This is just about the coolest thing ever. Dutch designer Anneke Jacobs first made this light fixture out of banana boxes in 2003 – but now, she’s released DIY instructions. I’m going to get to work on mine right away (you can buy one, too, if the project seems too daunting.)
Download the plans here (PDF file.)
via InventorSpot; thanks, Dimitri!
You can barely see the bananas on the package, and the product itself could do with a bit more banana flavor, too.
You will think I’m a lousy sourpuss for saying this, but there are WAY too many kinds of Cheerios. But that’s because you probably don’t know how many kinds: Eleven. That’s right. With the addition of the new banana-nut flavor, you now need your toes to count the number of varieties of America’s favorite breakfast food that are currently available on store shelves.
I don’t care how much you love Cheerios. Eleven kinds? That’s insane! (There are two Yogurt Burst flavors; only one is shown.)
The other thing that’s totally sucky about Cheerios is the brand’s constant harping on the “fact” that eating it “may” reduce the risk of heart disease. SHENANIGANS and BOGOSITY! Not eating a lot of bacon may reduce the risk of heart disease, and Cheerios may a breakfast delight, but can’t cereal just be advertised as something that tastes good, even if two of the Cheerios varieties are shameless imitations Kellogg’s Froot Loops and Apple Jacks – a couple of the best-tasting bowl-and-milk horrors ever created? (See links below for the actual health claims, and why they’re the bunk.)
Aa far as eating the new variety goes, I’d say the banana taste could be more pronounced, and I’m not sure the overall concept of putting banana in the cereal itself (rather than into the bowl with cereal, as has been done since Chiquita came up with the idea, nearly a century ago – the story of the development of bananas+cereal as a recipe is in my book) is a step in a good direction. Still, I rank the product pretty high on the breakfast taste scale. Bonus points for doing it without artificial flavors. If you like Cheerios, they’re worth trying.
General Mills has a special Banana Nut Cheerios website, with a movie, nutritional info, recipes, and a 55-cents off coupon. There are also some “banana fun facts,” some of which are – if not wrong – then poorly worded (like this one: “There is no such thing as a banana tree. Bananas grow on plants.” I think what they mean to say is that bananas are an herb, or that bananas grow on what are basically stems.)
More about Banana Nut Cheerios (including coupon) here.
Crazy, hyped, manipulative nutritional claims about the cereal brand here. Info on why those claims are completely bogus here.
Bonus breakfast suggestion – thinking about Cheerios for your kids? Consider that the vampiric occult treat, also from General Mills, contains THE SAME AMOUNT OF ADDED SUGAR – twelve grams per 27 gram serving – than at least two Cheerios varieties – Apple Cinnamon and Frosted (Banana Nut comes close, with nine grams.) And much of Count Chocula’s sugar is delivered in the optimal form of marshmallows. Manufacturer’s nutritional claims for Count Chocula: none. Suggested nutritional claim: feed this to your kids and they will grow up to be INTERESTING. The image of the demonic dark lord of daybreak delight comes from Derok, and you can learn ever more here.
Item one is a massive bar of soap – about the size of a mango – with this lovely banana branding. On opening, it turns out to be a Portuguese-made beauty bar marked “confianca”, or “confidence”.
No banana scent, but the word “banana” was brought to us in the15th century by Portuguese traders, who found the fruit being grown at a town near the mouth of the Congo river by the same name.
Thanks to the Thompson family for the loot.
Got this at a Philippine grocery a few blocks from my house in Los Angeles. Price: $1.59. The lady behind the counter called it "banana ketchup," and that's pretty much what it is, with the same basic ingredients – sugar, vinegar, salt, and spices – as the tomato stuff, but with bananas substituted for the red fruit base.
There are a bunch of varieties from Jufran. The product is listed at Ketchupworld.com, with both regular and hot versions; neither of these seem to be the one I found – the ingredients listed for both are different. The ketchup site gets $3.50 for a mail-ordered bottle. Searching around, it seems that the product has multiple incarnations, with different labeling – some designated as "sauce," others as "ketchup," and some using bright red food coloring to make them look more like the real thing. Mine is marked as "The Original," so I'll go with that.
How did ours taste? Fantastic: a little spicy, a little sweet – with the same consistency as tomato ketchup. I had mine on a big hunk of Turkey breast. Whupped the daylights out of cranberry sauce.
All hail the new King of Condiments.
Here's a link to a brief wikipedia entry on banana ketchup.
Lots of folks emailed me news items on this. Japan has gone nuts for the “Morning Banana Diet,” which promises to help you lose weight with this formula: you start in the morning with a breakfast of bananas and room-temperature water, then eat whatever you want – other than desert – the rest of the day. You can’t eat later than six in the evening. you don’t need to exercise, and people are going nuts. A half-dozen books on the diet have become best sellers, and the price of the fruit has shot up to over $3.00 per pound (more than quadruple what we pay in the U.S., and well over triple the average price in a Tokyo supermarket.)
The backstory? An opera singer told a talk show she’d lost over 30 pounds on the banana diet. The craze began from there.
Happy dieter, from a Reuters pic that accompanied a Time magazine story on the diet.
A spokesperson for Dole – the nation’s largest banana importer (second largest in the world) – told Great Britain’s Daily Mail that this was “the first time bananas have been so scarce. Right now, we are finding ourselves unable to meet demand.”
There was an earlier banana diet craze, in 1995, that began with the U.S. release of a book called “The Amazingly Simple Banana Diet,” by Clifford Thurlow (who also wrote a biography of Salvador Dali.) I couldn’t find any details on the actual program, sadly, or whether Japan’s morning banana regime was similar to it.
Does the diet work? Sure. If you eat fewer calories than you take in, then you’ll lose weight. If you skip your normal breakfast, and substitute a banana; and cut out alcohol and desserts – both of which might reasonably be assumed to be part of the diet of a person who might want to drop a few kilos, you’ll accomplish that goal. The books claim that the diet achieves weight loss through a lot of metabolic bunkum, which would be nice. In the 1920s, American banana companies hired armies of doctors to promote all kinds of health claims about the fruit, but even then, they pretty much stuck to the truth.
And even at three bucks a pound, you’ll still save money, after you weigh the price of what you’ve foregone, versus the single banana you’ve slotted in per day.
To get a little serious: as I’ve said in the past, the price of bananas is key to the fruit’s success – they are the cheap fruit. Things like disease and weather threaten to raise costs to point at which the fruit returns to its “genuine” state – an expensive, tropical rarity. I’ve advocated, as a solution to any future banana crisis, that importers look into providing a portfolio of banana varieties – as those same companies do with apples and citrus – that would diversify the crop and offer the fruit along a spectrum of tastes and prices. In its own ridiculous way, the Japan craze has proven that consumers will pay more for bananas if they that the fruit offers something more than just a partnership with corn flakes.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recommends it.
Listen to my interview on NPR's Fresh Air.
My own op-ed in the New York Times.
Other Books:
