Life

This “One A Day Bananas” Concept Just Solved Your Banana Ripeness Problems

by Mia Mercado
E-Mart

Ah, the banana. It’s like...I love you, but, hun, you are so finicky. Do I buy you when you’re yellow and ripe and hope that you don’t go brown and mushy the second I look away? Do I dare buy a green banana and wait patiently as you choose, defiantly, to never ripen? Well, praise the banana gods because “one-a-day bananas” are here to solve our banana woes. Finally, someone has an answer to the problem that has been driving us all *puts on sunglasses* bananas.

Thanks to Twitter user and blogger @AskAKorean, we now know the true and correct way all bananas should be sold: in a handy six-pack with varying stages of ripeness. @AskAKorean shared a photo of the “haru hana banana” (also known as “one-a-day bananas”) that are being sold at E-Mart, a grocery store chain in Korea. Per Daum, the Korean website that initially tipped off @AskAKorean, each pack comes with six bananas, ranging in ripeness from yellow and ready-to-eat to green and “will be ripe by the time you get around to it later this week.” No longer must our bananas face their inevitable fate of becoming delicious banana bread. (I mean, I love and cherish a good banana bread, but I want the option to eat a banana when it’s still ripe, you know?)

Daum also reports that E-Mart has been testing other way to sell finicking fruits, like easier-to-eat coconuts and special packs of watermelon. Basically, the fruit game in Korea is next level.

“One a day bananas” are far from the first or only banana invention as of late. Earlier this year, farmers in Japan created a banana with an edible peel. Due to a process called “freeze thaw awakening,” these Japanese bananas grow with a peel that is thin, sweet, and soft enough to eat. Typically, bananas require tropical climates to grow and thrive. However, farmers at one southern Japanese farm initially keep their banana trees at an extremely cold -76 degrees Fahrenheit (-60 degrees Celsius). Then, they replant their trees in a more typical 80 degree environment, causing a rapid growth spurt. Finally, you’re left with bananas with a peel you can eat.

Of course, the luxury of being able to eat an entire banana, peel and all, comes at a high cost. According to Quartz, these bananas with an edible peel run $6 each, which is impractical and hilarious and very Lucille Bluth. Perhaps the experience of biting into a banana sideways, like some kind of alien trying to navigate the local landscape, it worth paying 30 times more than you would for a normal banana.

In terms of finickiness, bananas come second only to the avocado. I’m convinced that if you look at an avocado wrong, it goes brown out of spite. Fortunately, food scientists are hard at work to solve the champagne problems that plague us all. Earlier this year, Costco started selling avocado that stay ripe for twice as long as regular avocados. Apeel Sciences developed a treatment they describe as “a family of plant-derived coatings” which preserve your foods’ ripeness for longer. The treatment is FDA-compliant and does nothing to change the taste, smell, or look of your food.

However, you may be asking, “How long is twice as long for an avocado? Is it, like, for ten minutes instead of five?” Avocados typically only stay ripe for a few days. If you refrigerate your avocado when it’s fully ripened, it will stay ripe for longer: between five to ten days. However, with the Apeel treatment, avocados will stay ripe for an entire week at room temperature. If you refrigerate them, you’ve have anywhere between two weeks to 20 days to eat them while they’re good.

Finally, we can all eat our fruit at the leisurely pace we desire, without fear of them spoiling too soon.