Bananas

Bananas are tropical or subtropical plants of the genus Musa that bear clusters of long yellow or reddish fruit. There are sixty-seven species and more than two hundred varieties of bananas. Cultivated as early as 1000 BCE in the rain forests of Southeast Asia, bananas were taken to the Near East and Africa by Arab traders in the seventh century. In 1516 the Catholic missionary Friar Tomás de Berlanga landed on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and planted bananas as the least expensive and most satisfactory food for the growing African slave population. When he became bishop of Panama, Friar Tomás took banana plants with him to the mainland. Bananas spread rapidly through Central America, Mexico, and southern Florida—so rapidly that later observers believed the banana to be native to the New World.