"Man Eating Banana" a tired retread of "Man Turning Somersault"

Geddit?  A "tired retread"?  'Cause tires?  Frequently have treads?  I slay me, I really do.

But let's move on to more important issues. Specifically I'd like to consider a common pattern—a common shape of events with which we're all familiar, whether explicitly or not. I refer to that pattern in which one starts off at one level, and then either ascends or descends to another, and then finally returns to the initial level—but changed for the journey. Consider, as examples, the lucky fall, or naive and sentimental poetry, or any of the many cases M. H. Abrams discusses in the "Circuitous Journey" chapters of Natural Supernaturalism.  Or, to take a case closer to daily experience, consider the peeling of a banana.

Our formonkeys, and monkeys even today, know that to eat a banana (and additionally to determine its ripeness) one must employ the bottom end, not the stem end.  However theirs is an ignoble, instinctive knowledge, innate and undistinguished by having been won through effort.  This is our starting point of innocence.  Many people—humans—currently peel bananas from the stem end (indeed, coming home this morning at 6am, I saw someone on the U-bahn so peeling a banana.  I winced when I heard the stem snap, knowing that she had probably bruised her fruit, and that she had exert far more force, with far less grace, than needed.  When I considered the sorry state she'd be in when she reached down to the bottom of the banana, and would have no secure grip with which to hold her snack, and needing instead to resort to ein bloßes Herumsnacken, a single tear fell from my left eye), a solution that speaks to our cleverness when confronted with a problem ("why, it's like it's there to be pulled off!" one can almost hear a primitive tool-user mutter), but which sadly illustrates Lichtenberg's claim that those with more cleverness than intelligence happen upon more ingenious than useful solutions (or something like that, I haven't the book to hand).

I recently tried to bring about a return to the correct, monkey-like method, introducing it into the wild, hoping that in this way we could reattain the banana-peeling of the golden age, but this time as a result not of instinct but of thought.  However, as are all would-be reformers, I was ridiculed and mocked, with support coming only from someone who thinks that bananas are to be eated with a fork and knife—that is, from the unequivocal dregs of society. You can find links, unsympathetically presented, here.  Some challenged the feasibility of the method.  Thus, here is proof that it can be done.  NB: in the second video I am porky piggin' it.

Are you dumber than a monkey?

Well, are ya?

Note the ease with which the banana is peeled.  Honestly, once you try it, you'll never go back.  You'll look on your former self as you would on a destitute stranger.

Comments

[A White Bear]

Harsh, BW. Stem-end eating is all we've known, and we merely require clarification such as that we hope to receive from your videos. I am downloading the revolution now.

[dagger aleph]

Why should I take banana-peeling advice from someone whose post contains a typo?

[A White Bear]

I certainly would have said "foremonkeys," but who am I to say?

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

That's it? I find your "revolutionary" method utterly bananal.

[Armsmasher]

I've heard this speel too many times.

[dave zacuto]

a solution that speaks to our cleverness when confronted with a problem

This is the most facile of all possible linguistic expressions of relation, but it seems appropriate in this post.

[A White Bear]

Also, da: "are to be eated"?

[bitchphd]

It isn't true that this method avoids mushing the end of the banana, but other than that I like your elaborate demonstration of the primary difference between people and apes: the ability to form elaborate rationalizations.

[dagger aleph]

Good eye, AWB -- I didn't even notice that one. I was thinking, rather, of "she had exert."

[Phutatorius' Chestnut]

Its ... its like staring into the monolith from 2001. It all makes sense now. So beautiful.

[slohmie]

I really like the little hand shrug before and after peeling the banana. All it takes is that tiny gesture for you to show your contempt for us: the ignorant.

[A White Bear]

I thought that too, slohmie, but I've met BW, and he does that little hand-gesture before and after most statements. OTOH, those tend also to be statements made for the benefit of the ignorant.

[text]

I've always eaten the banana stem down, for the reasons Ben suggests, though it came to me rather naturally, without consciously weighing the benefits and detriments of that method.

Am I a monkey?

[A White Bear]

This, text, is why I don't like explanations of what separates humans from the animals. Some humans are always being left out.

[text]

But it feels so satisfying to just pull off a section of peel without need of breaking anything, as though by sheer force of will, verily as though nature intended that my fingers peel bananas.

It's almost like shitting into my hand and throwing it at the gawking masses, only to see the shit splatter against the glass barrier and slide down to the bottom of my foul-smelling cage.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Stem-downism is so vulgar. It's like, I don't know, dowsing for genitals. Hey, look everybody, I found genitals.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

I see text has the vulgar angle covered.

[text]

Even in a crazy stem-up world, I do know where to find genitals.

[Inquisitor Genital Carlos de Cockamamie]

Where, pray tell?

[tonks]

*sigh* I did NOT say that I believed the correct way to eat a banana was with a knife and fork. I said that I had Googled "correct way to eat a banana" (among other related searches) and that the knife and fork method was the only thing that appeared. Apparently using utensils is good etiquette.

That said I find myself more often peeling bananas your way because, well, you're right. It just makes more sense.

[text]

oh bridgeplate, you've searched far and wide and travelled many oceans, witnessed many strange geographic formations, studied all sorts of tattoos: but that thing you've been searching for, why all along it was just beneath your nose.

[A White Bear]

Generally, I laugh at utensil-users. In Indian restaurants, the utensil-users gawk at me with my right-handed nan, and I gawk at them.

[ben wolfson]

I apologize for the typos, all; it is no satisfactory excuse, but I must mention that I typed this post using an unfamiliar keyboard layout, and in the heat of banana-related passion, and without adequate sleep.

[A White Bear]

I figured "formonkeys" was one of those Germanisms travellers pick up, like "vormonkeys."

[bitchphd]

Text's second commment totally made me laugh out loud.

[Idyllopus]

Well, I'm taking things back down a key here.

After experiencing for myself the ease of peeling from the not-a-stem end, I told my 8 year old son all about it. "No, no," he said, "they have to be opened from the top" and gave as evidence some PBS show. So, I took a banana and said, "See, I will show you." Staring at the banana it occurred to me a couple more trial runs before deeming this wisdom to pass along to the next generation might not have been a bad thing. Would I as successfully peel a banana this new (for me) way a second time? With absolute ease and no smushing?

Yes.

"You're right!" said my son.

So the wisdom progresses.