“Give thanks for a little, and you will find a lot.”—West African Hausa Promise
I was picking and sorting my way through the produce section when she rolled her grocery cart next to mine. “Perfect timing. I’m shopping for February 23rd and you’ve been on my mind,” my neighbor said.
My puzzled expression seemed to surprise her.
“February 23, February 23,” she repeated while frantically pressing her iPhone to bring the calendar in view.“ You of all people should know what I’m talking about,” then she turned the screen close enough for me to glimpse her phone’s February 23 square in all caps: BANANA BREAD DAY.
“Thanks for sharing this,” I said with a wave, thinking of the explosion of ridiculous hashtag holidays. And no, I don’t take the social media celebration announcements friends refer to as “Hashtag Holidays” seriously (see sources). But I remembered my Uncle Earl’s long-ago reminder: “Don’t blow out other people’s happy candles with logic.”
And sometimes, as in the case of my family’s strong appreciation for Mobile AL bananas, I welcome the opportunity to celebrate the fruit described as “distinctly tropical” in The Penguin Companion to Food edited by Alan Davidson (see sources) with a “remarkably high level of consumption in temperate countries.”
Davidson describes most banana varieties selected for export from Central America as almost uniform in appearance and, instead of flavor, selected mainly because they “ship well and look good.“
My maternal grandmother and great-grandmother were banana enthusiasts, and I grew up hearing my cooking mentor rave about “free bananas” thrown off the ships docking in her “Down the Bay” Mobile neighborhood.
Emily Blejwas confirmed Granny’s “flying banana stories” in The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods (see sources). Blejwas, director of the Alabama Folklife Association, describes Mobile’s first commercial banana shipment arriving in 1893 at the foot of Dauphin and Government Street. With rushed rail connections to St. louis and Chicago, no one wanted to haul ripe bananas to the Midwest. The shipping company was only interested in a rail haul with green bananas ripening during the journey.
I feel ancestors smiling down a thank you to my neighbor for shining the social media candle on the #BananaBreadDay for this granddaughter, who plans to share #BananaBreadDay samples with family, friends and—yes, a special neighbor.
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John-Bryan Hopkins, a food writer from Birmingham, Alabama, and founder of the popular website Foodimentary. Hopkins has 845,000 followers on Twitter, and his was named one of the 140 Best Twitter Feeds by TIME last year.
Sources:
Foodimentary by John-Bryan Hopkins / https://foodimentary.com/today-in-national-food-holidays/
Food Days by Scott Roberts / https://scottroberts.org/complete-listing-of-national-food-days/
The Penguin Companion to Food by Alan Davidson (Penguin Books, 1999)
The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods by Emily Blejwas (University Alabama Press, 2019)