Bananas are a starchy, sweet botanical berry and edible fruit that come from flowering banana plants. I always wondered about seeds in the banana. Are there any seeds, are they so tiny that they’re edible, what’s the real deal? In my ignorance, I actually believed there were tiny seeds that were edible, like strawberries. With my logic, I assumed the seeds are there, they’re just too tiny to see, I figured how else do they grow? How do you grow a plant without seeds? I’m guessing the same way you grow ginger or potatoes.

The older bananas are considered wild. The wild banana mostly consists of inedible seeds and a starchy pulp. Many cultures boiled it before eating. I can understand why the wild banana was replaced by the hybrid sterilized banana, and I can also see the consequences being a less nutritious fruit. The first bananas were discovered around 10,000 years ago in the Papau New Ginea area.

The most recent banana is the Cavendish-grown from a corm, shown here next to a wild banana. They are a split of two wild banana varieties; musa akuminata and musa balbisiana. They aren’t grown from seeds but from a bulb or rhizome. You plant the bulb in the ground and it splits. The banana plant is considered a plant because it’s not a tree. Now we have what we call a sterilized banana with undeveloped seeds yummy.

Some other bananas are the musa velutina, or the hairy pink banana. The peels are like firm springs that come right off the banana. They are a bit smaller and filled with seeds about 30 – 40 to each one. The taste is similar to the modern popular banana but a bit tangy.