Images of Discarded Banana Peels from London

That’s all you’ll find on this blog – nearly 100 of them. Here’s part of the anonymous creators’ statement:

“I see them everywhere. They’re languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they’re fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay. I don’t know how or why they caught my attention, but within a week of being in London I couldn’t get my mind off these banana skins. Where were they coming from? Who was eating all these bananas and leaving the skins around? Why was it always bananas I was seeing, and not, say, oranges? Was it a sign? Was there something sinister going on? Apparently these little hazards were a covert operation going completely unnoticed; everyone I asked about it said that they had never noticed anything of the sort and looked at me as if I was nuts.”

I buy it.

By the way, you really can slip on a discarded banana peel – in fact, the hazard was so real back when the fruit was introduced about a century ago that cities enacted ordinances against discarding the fruit’s outer skin. The reason so many banana wrappers were left laying around? Spectacular popularity: the early banana marketers were so good at building demand for the fruit that municipalities were literally overwhelmed with an unexpected glut of rotting, slippery waste. Simply put: there weren’t enough trash cans to hold all the banana peels. No kidding, There’s a whole section about it in my book; you can also hear my talk about it in my Fresh Air interview, linked above.

Via Boing-Boing .

Tags: Banana Weird