Don't Go Too Bananas. . .

From Wikipedia, Taken by Timothy Walker

Recently Health Digest, a Health/Wellness Website with nearly 2 million likes on Facebook, shared a post entitled “Banana for Breakfast Anyone???”  I love a good banana.  Or banana bread.  Or a banana split, so when my first friend shared it, I read it with interest.  Bananas, I learned, were high in iron, great for constipation (getting rid of it), provided an instant boost of energy, and in a program at a Twickenham School in England, a school administrated, I assume, entirely by monkeys, students ate bananas at every meal and by the end of the year had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson in the particle accelerator they built in their gym as an after school project.  Also, bananas, when inserted as a suppository, are a foolproof cure for the hiccups.

Okay, maybe I added some "facts" of my own at the end there, but while I’m no nutritionist, I am a researcher, and when I see that many un-cited claims, my first instinct is to check them out.  Once I started, all but the most obvious claims quickly unraveled.

For instance, the post claims that bananas are great for anemia because they’re high in iron, according to the Wikipedia entry, the average banana has 1% of your daily iron: hardly "high" in iron.  Though that’s for a medium-size banana.  Who knows how high it could go for a large banana?

Another claim suggests that a recent “survey” showed that people who ate a banana each day were less depressed “because bananas contain tryptophan”.  Most of the craze around Tryptophan is based on a 1986 Psychopharmacology study that showed doses of 1-15 grams helped situational insomnia: Livestrong says the average banana contains .011 grams of Tryptophan, so on average you'd need to eat about 100 bananas to get to the low end of that range level.

And yes, it has "FOUR TIMES" the protein of apple, but I'd hardly recommend replacing your whey protein with bananas, as you'd have to eat nearly 40 bananas to get to the RDA. 

While the post said nothing about this, I did learn that bananas are also relatively high in Magnesium (eat two!), a good source of Vitamin C (move over orange juice, it’s banana juice time) and even better source of Vitamin B-6, and I know from the constant barrage of energy drink advertisements that B vitamins make it possible for even relatively un-athletic somnolent adults to base-jump, BMX bike, and drive for 27 hours straight (I’ll double check these claims later).

The final stroke was when I looked into the details for the Twickenham School for Criminally Insane Monkeys in Rehabilitation (TSCIMR).  A banana at every meal?  What could have provoked a school to make that choice?  Searching for information about this experiment turned up nothing about what lead to it being conducted, or how it turned out, but it did emerge that despite the fact that the post said “this year”, the story about the Twickenham Experiment dates back at least to 2005, as does the original post, which was debunked on truthorfiction.com by Chiquita banana representative and has been reposted many times over the years, by some who refer to the email their aunt sent them, and by others who claim it as their own "research" (i.e. plaigirized).   Meanwhile, the claim about “a Twickenham school” (visit scenic Twickenham) is either a total fabrication, or the articles about their experiment are buried too deeply beneath all the different reposts of Bullsh*t About Bananas that it'd be too time consuming for me to find it in search results.  A search on scholar.google.com for Twickenham and bananas turned up nothing in the first 100 results that sounds remotely like this.

The best lies are built around shreds of truth, and so I wonder if in fact this banana post is one of the least questioned and most successfully propagated in the last decade.  While I wasn't able to find any proof the Twickenham Banana Experiment actually happened, some of the articles I found in Google Scholar even referenced the apocryphal study. The lesson, I guess, is that just because a webpage or Facebook page contains “Health” in its title, or has a lot of fans/likes doesn’t mean that they are even remotely responsible health professionals.  And that bananas are great as part of a well-balanced diet, but don’t expect it to solve all your health problems.  Though if you have the hiccups, please let me know how the suppository treatment goes.

What am I going to do with all this kale?

Curly Kale, photo by Rasbak

Kale wasn’t a staple of my diet growing up.  It was one of the odd cruciferous vegetables out.  We had cabbage in particular dishes, like holapki.  Broccoli was a constant, usually boiled el dente.  But we didn’t go in much for swiss chard or kale.   Maybe it’s for the same reason that we avoided spinach: it could inflame my Dad’s gout.  Really though, I suspect we didn’t eat kale because we weren’t sure what to do with it.  It was the dark, brusque leaf of the lettuce aisle, but clearly not a lettuce that lent itself to being dowsed with Caesar salad dressing and tossed with artichoke hearts and strips of salami.  When we went shopping together, my Mom got Romaine lettuce, but that was all, at least until I she began indulging developed a strange obsession I had with radishes.

So I didn’t get my first taste of kale until I went to Oberlin, and joined the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association (OSCA). The most radical coops seemed to be on a mission to ban anything with flavor or the most dubious ties to unethical practices.  I once managed to get chocolate banned in one coop (not one I dined at), solely on the basis of a rumor.  Less radical coops merely outlawed meat (except for the occasional free-range lamb or pig roast) and glorified and proselytized in support of kale. Coop chefs insisted that it was not only packed with nutrients and fiber (as though fiber were lacking in the OSCA diet), but also that it was hearty and delicious on its own merits, to the point where it could serve as the main course of a dinner, virtually without spice. 

Well-intentioned amateur chefs stir-fried it with soy sauce.  The burned aroma clung in the air like the opposite of ambrosia.  They tossed shredded up hunks of it into watery soups.  They rinsed it with dubious vigor and then tore it up into abrasive handfuls and doused it with oil and vinegar... in other words, they had no idea what to do with it either. Rather than tempering its intensity, they enhanced it, so I got the sense that I was eating some leafy metallic machine, gritty, and often oily.  I started to avoid meals where I knew there would be kale, and when co-opers praised it, I often judged them in other ways, assuming that this lack of taste spread to other avenues of their life.  Occasionally someone would suggest that it made a great smoothy, and the image frothy green kale was enough to force me to leave the conversation and head immediately to Gibson's Food Market and Bakery for an antidote in the form of a heavily malted chocolate milk shake.  I once went on a date with a girl who proclaimed fervent kale-love, and I mumbled something about it being okay, but couldn't bring myself to go on another date with her. 

That was many years ago now, but it turns out those co-op cooks were cutting edge: the last few years there’s been a kale-splosion, supposedly because kale is a superfood.  Blueberries are also a superfood, and you can make pie out of them.  “Kale pie” sounds like a cruel joke.  But one week, when they were out of clamshell plastic boxes of fresh baby spinach, and there was a sale on baby kale, I bought it.

Like all the babies I’ve ever eaten, including lamb, veal, and baby bok choy, baby kale is significantly better than its more world weary older counterpart.  First, it’s more tender, making it feasible to mix into a salad.  At least if that salad is primarily made up of other greens, and perhaps has some sautéed squash, goat cheese, and beets to provide sidekick support to this superfood.  The same goes for the taste.  Second the taste is less intense: still strong, but not confrontational.  My personal strategy for dealing with baby kale is to drizzle some honey over it and then caramelize it briefly in a dry frying pan.  I’ve tried the same with adult kale, but the more mature leaf requires more subterfuge.  More honey, and perhaps some fat: fried vegetables are even more super, right?

With a controlled amount of kale, as a break from my usual leafy greens, this can hit the spot.  But there’s only so much honeyed kale I can eat, so when I got my first CSA share for the summer, featuring pounds upon pounds of the stuff I could feel my past fears kicking in.  I tied off the bags, and put them deep in the crisper, but eventually the more friendly veggies, like squash and carrots were gone.  Something had to be done.

There’s now a whole region of the internet dedicated to kale recipes.  Some, particularly those that dowse the kale with some type of sugar, or make it a small part of a larger dish featuring shrimp sound like they could work, but others seem to have been posted by former coop-chefs’ with little idea what to do.  Few call for cooking the kale, and many require special treatment.  For instance, before mixing a lemon-kale salad with Parmesan (sounds pretty good, except the kale), you are invited to gently (oh so gently) massage the kale; I assume to relieve any stress it might be feeling, and loosen knots in the crinkled leaves that could lead to the eater needing some sort of temporomandibular joint disorder therapy.

Another common preparation is the “kale chip”.  These are popping up in organic food aisles at alarming prices.  $6.00 for 3 ounces of wannabe nori?  I can’t get behind that, no matter how well dredged it is in nutritional yeast flakes or totally organic orange cheese powder.  One online recipe proclaims it “great for parties and a good conversation starter”.  Woe on me if I ever hold a party where the chemistry is so low that I need a cruciferous vegetable to get things going, but the reviews suggest that for many these chips are a revelation, trumping even pancakes in a can, or the invention of the sliced apple.  People reported calling all their friends, fooling their children (how? how could you fool a child into thinking this was anything but a leaf with salt?), and repairing their relationship with their husbands, all of whom professed doubt these would be as good as Lays (who still buys Lays?  Please let me introduce you to a kettle chip), but were filled with new found admiration for their wives, and for our nations’ hardworking kale farmers.

When I announced to my family via our daily email that I would be making kale chips, my mother wrote “Kale chips.  Yum!”.  When I responded with my own doubts she amended “The yum for kale chips was, um, a question.” Honestly, that’s the response that makes the most sense to me, but still I decided to give it a shot.  After all, I had a lot of kale in the fridge, and I don’t know what happens when a superfood goes bad.  What if it was too super, too strong? I can only assume it would free itself from the crisper and then smother me in my sleep, before laying waste to Pittsburgh.

I cut the stems off the kale, rinsed the leaves, and then tore them down to chip-like size.  I dredged them in olive oil, a little pink Himalayan salt, and put them in the oven for 10-15 minutes before removing my handiwork.  To say the kale melts in your mouth would be a lie, but I ate one of the crinkled crisps, then another, and soon was piling handfuls of chips, as well as the limper, less well baked pieces into my mouth.  The kale chips were gone in under 10 minutes.  I made another batch, this one baked longer and with some garlic powder, and then another with garlic powder and rosemary.  So it’s with some chagrin given my previous, anti-kale stance, that I must admit that kale chips are delicious and addictive.  Partly, it’s a vehicle for whatever flavors you put on it while it bakes, but it also retains a reminder of kale’s signature strength.  Also, it’s lighter and crisper than a potato chip, with a seductive whisper, rather than crunch.  I have no pictures, because I ate the chips too fast, and in fact, I have no kale remaining in my crisper, and I’m considering the previously unthinkable: buying more kale.

In the most recent CSA pick up there was no kale, but instead several pounds of swiss chard.  If there is any leaf I’m less interested in than kale, it’s swiss chard.  Kale’s taste is strong, and for a leaf, has a certain meatiness to it.  But swiss chard tastes like sweet dirt. tossed in a roux with a little cream and nutmeg, this earthiness finds its voice, but now I wonder whether I can save myself by making chips.  “Chard chips”, despite the alliteration, doesn’t sound that great, in part because it could be confused with "charred chips", which I don't recommend, but maybe it could work.  Some how I’ve got to answer the question “What am I going to do with all this swiss chard?”.