Organic dried banana from Cameroon, fair trade, made from the Gros Michel variety. Picked ripe, dried quickly at low temperature, and nothing else added — no sugar, no oil, no sulphites, no preservative.
Gros Michel is a genuinely remarkable thing to find in a bag
Until the 1950s, almost every banana eaten in Europe and North America was a Gros Michel. It was the export banana — sweeter, denser and more strongly flavoured than what we eat now — and it was grown in vast single-cultivar plantations across Central America.
Then Panama disease, a soil-borne fungus, moved through those plantations and destroyed them. Because every plant was a genetic clone of every other, there was no resistance anywhere in the crop. Within a couple of decades the commercial Gros Michel trade had collapsed, and the industry switched wholesale to the Cavendish — a variety that resisted that strain of the fungus, and which is the banana in every supermarket in the world today.
Gros Michel never disappeared. It is still grown on a smaller scale in West and Central Africa, where the disease pressure is different, and it is still the better-tasting banana. That is what is in this bag.
(A postscript worth knowing: a new strain, Tropical Race 4, is now moving through Cavendish plantations for exactly the same reason — a global monoculture of a single clone. The industry is repeating the experiment.)
What dried banana is, and what it is not
This is not a banana chip. Banana chips are sliced thin, deep-fried in coconut oil, usually sweetened, and crisp. They are a fried snack.
This is whole banana dried slowly at low temperature until the water has gone — soft, dark, chewy and intensely sweet, with a flavour more like banana bread than fresh fruit. The darkening is caramelisation and natural browning, not a fault, and its absence in a paler dried banana usually means sulphites have been used.
No sulphites here, which matters for anyone with asthma or a sulphite sensitivity — sulphites are a declarable allergen above 10 mg/kg and a common trigger.
The fair trade part, specifically
BIOFRUI has worked in Cameroon and Togo for over thirty years. The structure is worth stating plainly, because “fair trade” is often left vague: the fruit is bought from small producers, dried in a local workshop rather than shipped raw to Europe for processing, and a development fund is paid on top of the price, spent according to what the producer groups themselves decide they need.
Drying locally is the part that does most of the work. It keeps the processing value — and the jobs — in the country the fruit came from, rather than exporting a raw commodity and importing back a finished product.
How to use it
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Out of the bag, which is mostly what happens.
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Walking, cycling, climbing — dense, sweet, light and unsquashable, which is the whole reason dried fruit exists as a food.
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Chopped into porridge, granola, yoghurt or overnight oats, where it softens and sweetens without added sugar.
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Baking — chopped into banana bread, flapjack or cookies, where the concentrated flavour is far stronger than fresh banana.
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Blended into a smoothie, or soaked briefly in warm water and mashed to sweeten something.
Being honest about the sugar
Drying removes water and concentrates everything else, sugar included. Dried banana is a very sugar-dense food — a small handful is the equivalent of several fresh bananas.
That is not a problem; it is what makes it useful on a long walk. But it is worth knowing, and it is worth knowing that sticky dried fruit clings to teeth, which is why dentists treat it less kindly than the health-food aisle does. Not last thing at night, and rinse with water afterwards.
Dried banana is commonly recommended to athletes for its potassium and carbohydrate. You will not find that here. Nutrition claims of that kind may only be made when the food meets defined thresholds and are stated in prescribed wording; check the nutrition panel on the pack for the actual figures.
Storage
Airtight, cool and dark. Unsulphured dried fruit keeps residual moisture, so a badly closed bag will eventually go hard or, in a humid kitchen, mould. In summer, keep it in the fridge.
Whole dried fruit is a choking hazard for very young children — chop it.
treatfuls
treatfuls
treatfuls
