Results tagged “banana”

Since time immemorial, the only thing protecting the world's precious banana fruit from contamination has been the boring old peel. Well, Momma Nature, it's a new millennium, and it's time for a brand new bag! So 7-Eleven has come up with a new twist on an old classic: The company will now begin individually wrapping each banana sold in its stores in plastic. It's a start, but ultimately we'd like to see each banana also packaged in a bruise-resistant Styrofoam shell.

Kenny Shopsin of Shopsin's (read the background story here) just came out with a fantastic new book, Eat Me. More than a cookbook, it includes a wonderful collection of tales of the restaurant and his family, and a lot of insight into Kenny's views on food and cooking. The real value in the book lies in Kenny's explanation of how he deconstructs dishes and puts them together in unexpected but perfectly reasonable (once he explains them to you, that is) permutations.

Just how well do you know your morning snack? [Cue ominous music] Find out tonight at KGB Bar when Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, reads from his book. Koeppel’s dedication to unpeeling the history of the fruit (turns out it’s actually a berry) admirably resists puns like the one found at the beginning of this sentence, and what seems at first to be another “single item history” nonfiction food book (Potato, Salt, Beans, Caviar, Vanilla) at times brims with manic, even evangelical writing, but Koeppel has good reason: It turns out the modern banana crop is the lynchpin for more than a half dozen topical issues, everything from terrorism (including state-sponsored terrorism) to the locavore movement.