HS Flora
| Mai'a |
| Written by Paul Wood |
| July 18, 2008 |
 Photos by Ron Dahlquist In Belgium recently, bureaucrats of the EU created a legal definition for the term "banana." As a valid commercial product, the fruit (they decided) must be at least 5.5 inches long, 1.1 inches wide, and "not abnormally bent." In other words, they recognize only industrial-age bananas—bland, uniform Chiquita-logs exported by the ton from Central America. They would have rejected the banana that this writer ate on the morning he composed this story. The fruit, grown in a Lahaina backyard, was stubby and fat, not at all curved, and colored almost orange in the center. Its flavor was tangy like a peach or a nectarine.  Planet Earth is home to hundreds of types of fruits that can be called "banana" (if eaten raw and sweet) or "plantain" (if eaten cooked, a starch), and EU lawmakers disregard 99 percent of them. What do they know? They dwell in the wintry land of Brussels sprouts, and a banana is as tropical as Tarzan. Let them have the word "banana." Let the other 99 percent be represented by mai‘a ("my ah"), a Hawaiian word. The Hawaiian Dictionary lists 60 names for varieties of mai‘a, most of them brought to the Islands long ago by Polynesians, or else propagated by Hawaiian farmers in now-remote valleys and gardens. These names include the mai‘a puhi (the writhing-eel banana, a plantain whose fruit is twisted when it's young); mai‘a mahoe (the twin banana, which bears two stalks of tasty small salmon-colored fruits on each trunk); mai‘a moa (the chicken banana, with an egg-shaped fruit); mai‘a‘ele‘ele (the black banana, an orange-fleshed plantain whose gleaming black bark can be used to weave dark accents into handmade mats and hats); mai‘a koa‘e (tropic-bird banana, whose leaves and trunk are beautifully striped); and the mai‘a hapai (the pregnant banana, whose sweet fruit ripens within the trunk and can only be had by performing the vegetable equivalent of a C-section).  No one can say how many types of mai‘a are growing out there in the tropical forests, nor exactly how the various types are related to each other. Human beings have been crossing strains of mai‘a and trading them for hundreds of thousands of years. The botanical name includes an "x" meaning crosses or hybrids, scads of them. The antiquity of this relationship between kane and mai‘a—man and banana—can be glimpsed in its species name, "paradisiaca." That's right. This plant was present in Paradise. In fact, the earliest biblical scholars state that this was the original forbidden tree, the one that taught humankind about good and evil. That makes sense. It couldn't have been an apple tree unless Eden used to be in Vermont. No one would ever dress in fig leaves, which are prickly, itchy, and too small to cover – well, very much.. But banana leaves are huge, supple, cool, smooth, and coated with a natural talcum powder. And bananas are a perfect food. A single banana sustained Kukali, a Hawaiian folk hero, through many fabulous adventures. Whenever Kukali peeled back the skin and ate the fruit, he would fold the skin together again and the fruit would return. Mai‘a was all he needed. Bananas contain three kinds of natural sugar—sucrose, fructose, and glucose—along with fiber, and this combo provides energy both instant and sustained. Two bananas will power a strenuous 90-minute workout. Bananas also contain tryptophan, a protein that the body converts into mood-elevating serotonin. They make you feel happy. Their high levels of B vitamins calm the nerves and relieve PMS, and their rich potassium supply reduces blood pressure and the likelihood of strokes.  Bananas improve school performance by making students more alert; this was proved by 200 students at a Twickenham, Middlesex, school who ate bananas for breakfast, snack, and lunch (and stayed wide awake all day). Bananas relieve constipation, heartburn, and morning sickness, and a banana milkshake sweetened with honey is the fastest way to cure a hangover. Bananas are the perfect response to pressure-induced food cravings, so they actually cure obesity among the overworked.Not only that, the inside of a banana peel is great for the skin, soothing bites and curing warts. Rub one on your shoes and buff with a cloth—instant shoeshine. In 1998, Americans ate an average of 28.58 pounds of bananas per person. They ate only 19.2 pounds of apples. Mai‘a looks like a tree, and some plants grow 25 feet tall, but its trunks are simply leaf-stalks thrust upward by powerful underground corms. The trunks unfurl great sail-like leaves that flutter in the wind, tearing into ribbons. As the leaves get exhausted, the plant sends a spear right up the center of the trunk, a flowering spike that ripens into a larder. The trunk does not survive the flowering. Best practice is to chop it down—two swipes with a machete and it slams to earth with a celery-crunch roar. By then, two more trunks have already shot up to replace it. One can grow mai‘a in temperate regions, planted against a south-facing wall, for example, with lots of water and fertilizer. This is a jungle plant. Go easy on the sunlight and hard on the humidity. Just don't bother trying to sell your bunches in Belgium. |
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