General Question

tinyfaery's avatar

What is the best way to transport a banana?

Asked by tinyfaery (44242points) April 15th, 2021

When I leave for work with my banana it is pretty and yellow and ready to eat. When I get to work it’s sad and brown and ready for the trash. Sometimes I even put it on the floor away from anything and it is still bruised and brown when I get to work.

Suggestions?

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38 Answers

ragingloli's avatar

Just embrace the brown banana.

AK's avatar

Carry a semi ripe one. It would take a couple of hours to be ripe enough to eat but won’t be bruised or discolored when it is getting transported. We do it all the time.

Tropical_Willie's avatar

Wrapped in three layers of bubble wrap.

tinyfaery's avatar

@Lightlyseared I have thought about it but I’d feel like an idiot with it.
@ragingloli Brown is fine. Bruised and mushy is not.
@AK I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll give that a try.

Lightlyseared's avatar

Yes, probably but, and here’s the important bit, an idiot with an edible banana.

:)

rebbel's avatar

Embrace your idiocy (I know I would) and go for this:
Banana Holder

janbb's avatar

This may be my favorite question of recent times (which is not saying much.) How about in an old fashioned metal lunch box?

elbanditoroso's avatar

Teleportation. It won’t spoil on the way.

RocketGuy's avatar

Carry it open to fresh air (not in a bag). It releases ethylene gas all the time. Accumulations of ethylene gas e.g. while in a closed bag will make it ripen very quickly.

hello321's avatar

In the stomach.

zenvelo's avatar

Put it in the back pocket of your cycling jersey. I’ve ridden 50, 60 miles with a banana that way.

Carry in a six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch, it last all Day-O

janbb's avatar

@zenvelo Is that a banana in your pocket or are you glad to see me?

smudges's avatar

@rebbel Cool site, and I bet I can find stuff that women would want! I wanna stay at Hotel Bjornson, for sure!

Hawaii_Jake's avatar

Not by pack mule.

tinyfaery's avatar

Well, I might just go with the weird banana holder.

janbb's avatar

@tinyfaery And just think, your banana will be safe from STDs!

JLeslie's avatar

Are you putting it in a cold lunch box? Cold turns the peel brown, but the banana itself should still look fine.

Can you bring a couple of semi-green ones to work on Monday in a grocery bag and eat them during the week? I assume you don’t want one every day.

kritiper's avatar

Put it in a lunchbox with some ice. You can put the ice in a lunch bag or plastic tub with a lid. But keep the thing cool.

si3tech's avatar

@tinyfaery To kep my bananas from getting too ripe I keep them in the refrigerator. The skin turns dark but the banana remains good for many days.

SnipSnip's avatar

Transport it in a bag with a soft interior. A beautiful yellow skin can hide a bruise and a brown place on the skin may mean nothing. Bananas are not cared for during shipping like they were when I was young. I remember the people at the corner grocery being so very careful handling the bananas.

Brian1946's avatar

@RocketGuy

“It releases ethylene gas all the time.”

If I was trapped inside an airtight roomful of bananas, would the banana gas pose a danger by itself?

Patty_Melt's avatar

DON’T wrap it in plastic. Don’t refrigerate your banana. Once removed they brown more quickly.

Eat PANCAKES instead!

Response moderated
birsy's avatar

In my pants where else?

RedDeerGuy1's avatar

Make banana bread instead with your bananas or over ripe ones. Transports better.

Nomore_lockout's avatar

An eaten banana is a happy banana, an uneaten banana is a sad banana. What kind of banana do YOU want?

RocketGuy's avatar

@Brian1946 – ethylene doesn’t seem to be particularly toxic. You might get to the flammability first: https://www.lindeus.com/-/media/corporate/praxairus/documents/sds/ethylene-c2h4-safety-data-sheet-sds-p4598.pdf?la=en

tinyfaery's avatar

Today I brought in a bunch of 4 bananas. The bunch moved around a lot less in my car than a single banana, and they seem to be in better shape than my poor single bananas. We’ll see how this works out.

Stay tuned for more hard-hitting banana news on Friday to find out how me and my bananas fared.

janbb's avatar

@tinyfaery Maybe we can make this story go viral!

tinyfaery's avatar

Update: I’d call this experiment a failure.

The bunch of bananas I brought in on Monday was almost ripe. On Tuesday the bananas looked good and I ate one for breakfast. On Wednesday I came in and the bananas looked like they had been sitting around for 4–5 days and not 2 days.

I asked one of the attorneys who has been following the banana saga what he thought happened and he reminded me that sometimes our building turns off the HVAC at night so it gets warm and stuffy in the office. Ugh. The bananas were still edible so I ate one and put the last 2 in the fridge, as someone here suggested. When I came in on Thursday, the bananas were gone. I asked around and one of my fellow employees threw them out because she thought they were rotten. So… that was a bust.

I think I have to either feel like an idiot with the banana protector or just deal with the not so fresh banana on a daily basis.

rebbel's avatar

@tinyfaery You are (already) an idiot (as are all of us (especially @whatstheirname)).
Like I said before, just embrace your inner idiot.
Draw attention to your banana carrier!
Exaggerate the existence of it.
That way you are the subject of laughter and/or ridicule for half a work day (and you brought it on purpose upon yourself even).
From then on you’ll be that person that was the first with the banana carrier, and soon everybody will follow suit!

JLeslie's avatar

I love this Q. It’s interesting that the building has such an affect on bananas. Here in Florida bananas get ripe in two days. You can watch a fully green banana turn mostly yellow in a day. Even though it is indoors in air conditioning, it is still very fast.

My MIL continued to buy a bunch of bananas (like 5 at a time) for years and always wound up throwing at least one out. The waste bothered me, I couldn’t understand it. Anyway, I am not sure exactly what it is about Florida that they ripen so fast, but maybe it is something similar to what is happening in your building. Maybe it is humidity?

I do put my bananas in the fridge as soon as they are yellow (I like my bananas almost a little green left on them) and the peel turns brown, but the fruit is still edible for me for two more days.

SnipSnip's avatar

A lot has changed in how foods are warehoused and transported. My daughter was an ag major and I used to read her textbooks when I found them interesting. I read, in one of those books, that some fruits and vegetables respond very well to cold wind so they are now packed in wooden crates with plenty of open space on palletes that allow wind to be blown under and over each ‘floor’ of crates. The crates are not stacked directly on top of each other. There are spaces on all four sides of each crate. Inside the warehouse there are machines with hoses that connect to the pallets to create the cold wind. The produce guy at my market told me that the wind helps keep the bananas visually green longer. This MAY help explain why we buy greenish bananas and two days later the peel looks perfect but the inside is very ripe. More research needed. ;)

Response moderated (Unhelpful)

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