How to Peel a Banana

If you're like me you grew up opening bananas just like this picture. You'd grasp the stem and pull back, sometimes digging your thumb in to assist cleaving the stem from the fruit.

And you'd be wrong.

How should you open a banana?

This is the question I just posed to my officemates, none of which were aware of the simple solution monkeys know:

1. Flip the banana around so that you're holding the stem of the banana. (The stem being the growth that connects with other bananas to form a bunch.)
2. Start the peel at the end that's facing up, doing a pinch-and-tug to get the peel off.
3. Peel it on down. It should peel just right.

The monkey method has several advantages:

• It does not smash the top of the banana
• There is a handy stem to hold onto while you eat
• You get far less of the stringy fibers to remove

This revelation certainly leads one to question this thesis about the banana:



Whether God begot the banana is irrelevant, the humor for me lies in the fact that the demonstration of God's perfection contains an imperfection that would make a monkey howl.

Didn't Charles Darwin suggest monkeys were the origin of our species? Why don't we inherently know how to open a banana?

Ben Franklin said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Maybe it is that simple. Because there's one more benefit to the banana our apostle forgot: humor.