Harvest Time-- Kentucky Banana Festival

Where else can you shave a Llama, practice your atlatl self-defense skills, and gorge yourself on the only tropical fruit that thrives in Ohio? The Pawpaw Festival of course!!

Dad, Matti, and I hit up Athens, Ohio last weekend for an edu-taining day, immersing ourselves in Native American (and carnie) lore. Athens is the self-proclaimed pawpaw capital of the world. The pawpaw is sometimes called the Kentucky banana, and these people go bananas for them.

Big Daddy Dwyer

Big daddy Kentucky banana

The adventure coincided with a mind-blowing book I'm reading called "1491" by Charles C. Mann about what the Western Hemisphere was like prior to Christopher Columbus kicking off the European invasion that wiped out 95% of the population. Mann blows holes in the myth that America was an untouched wilderness when the Europeans arrived. We have this erroneous image of eco-Indians leaving no footprints on a virgin forest, when in fact they were quite busy doing some large scale plant cultivation and geo-engineering. He even argues that the Amazon is a remnant of an orchard once-managed by the millions of inhabitants who used to live there. They also managed the bison and passenger pigeon populations before they reached millions and billions, respectively. We call the Western Hemisphere the "new world", even though it was teaming with millions of people while Europe was still buried under ice.

FESTIVAL PICS

Beneath the totem pole, we learned how to make fire the old fashioned way-- from a hungover Indian impersonator in aviators. Matti suspects his "sunglasses" were actually decorative grisly bear eye balls.

Alpaca wool comes in a variety of colors (no need for dyes). It is softer, warmer, more durable, and cleaner than wool. I'm not sure if you can smoke it, but I'm pretty sure everybody at the Pawpaw Festival has tried.

You could burn some calories making ice cream the way Indians used to?

It doesn't look like a nanner, but it tastes GOOD.

Raccoons and squirrels usually get the wild ones around our house.

It's like eating a Gogurt-- just squeeze the mush out. It can taste like caramel, honey, mango, banana, apple, pineapple, melon, and/or peach custard. Wild ones can also taste kinda bitter. My favorite cultivated variety is the Shenandoah.

The atlatl is part arrow, part spear, thrown with a lever. It was more accurate and deadly than European guns at the time of Columbus or Cortez.

A couple of weeks ago, my sky was falling when I heard an NPR interview of Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. In his book, he talks about the demise of our beloved Cavendish species that we all know from the grocery store. We eat more Cavendish bananas than apples and oranges combined! Soon, the Cavendish will be extinct since it is being wiped out by something called Panama Disease and each banana is a genetically susceptible seedless clone. It's unfortunate, because on so many levels, bananas are "quite possibly, the world's perfect food." They're delicious, nutritious, calorie dense, cheap, durable, transportable, convenient, beautiful, wiener-shaped. What's not to like? Just their shallow gene pool I suppose.

Don't expect this car or its fruity decoration to live much longer. The banana's days are numbered. Don't look for a pawpaw version of the car either-- whoever said the pawpaw is the next banana doesn't understand home economics or the first law of thermodynamics.

Despite their good intentions, the Pawpaw Festival shattered any illusions I had of making the pawpaw a local replacement for my staple food, the banana (I eat about 20 per day). Calling the pawpaw the "Kentucky banana" or "Hoosier banana" is a huge misnomer. Here's where the pawpaw doesn't live up to the banana:
*they sells for $10/lb!!!!! (compare that $.10/lb that I sometimes pay for my nanners)
*they bruise easily
*they ripen, and then fall off the tree spontaneously (the banana ripens after being picked)
*only 65-75 grow per tree per year
*trees cannot be grown easily or densely (~290/acre)
*harvests are sporadic, sometimes non-existant, and usually last only about 6 weeks starting in August
*they are filled with about 10 big astringent seed casings which aren't good for smoothies
*the squirrels and raccoons and deer usually get first dibs from the wild ones

If I had my wish from the genetic modification genie, I'd cross-breed the pawpaw with the seedless watermelon and the banana, so that you could have a huge red fruit (everyone likes red), with no seeds (no one likes seeds), a convenient wrapper only opened by creatures with opposeable thumbs (I'm all thumbs), with some occasional wiener-shapes to boot (everyone likes provocative fruit). 

Wiener-shapes are actually an important component to the history of the banana. The scandalous shape offended Victorian comportment and may have prevented them from gaining traction on the apple sooner. They came up with all kinds of clever ways to serve them in more modest ways--chopped up or wrapped up. Victorian marketing campaigns were pretty clever to get images of Victorian ladies eating bananas uncut and uncensored all over the Victorian version of the internet.