Dan Koeppel's BlogBananas, Los Angeles, and Transit Geekery

The original filename for this image was “Banana Haiku Operation.” I guess because of the seven slices? Kinda over my head. Still, a masterpiece in the illustrations on bananas department. Thanks Jocelyn!

Commercial bananas have always been about brutal corporate trampling of the world. Disney hopes to extend its reach in that regard to our food supply, as Slate speculates on the company’s plan to offer fruit and eggs (!) branded with its lineup of teen idols.

Kooky fruitmobile, from Funstasticus.

This is the craziest fruit truck ever. Where was the image shot? Hard to say. Judging from the apparent ethnicity of the driver and the guy watching, it could be Latin America, or it could be the Philippines, or somewhere else. The other items on the truck – pineapples, squash, sweet potato – could be grown in either place. Check the banana trees growing behind the house to the left. The image is from the Funtasticus website.

Follow-up: After examining the photo, my Dad notes that "just above the right tire are some daikon, and about a foot above the scale is a Durian(?). If these IDs are correct, it is Asia/ Philippines. Although daikon can be grown anywhere, I am not aware of Durian growing anywhere besides Asia, Philippines, Indonesia."

Good one, Dad!

Can't narrow the Asia part down, but if we arbitrarily make it a choice between Indonesia and the Philippines, then the Philippines gets the nod. Why? In the Philippines, traffic keeps right – and the driver sits on the left, according to Wikipedia. In Indonesia, roadside custom is the opposite. To the extent that this overburdened little truck is being "driven" – the driver seems to be stepping out of his compartment, and it may very well be to push – it seems to be happening from the left side.

That’s all you’ll find on this blog – nearly 100 of them. Here’s part of the anonymous creators’ statement:

“I see them everywhere. They’re languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they’re fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay. I don’t know how or why they caught my attention, but within a week of being in London I couldn’t get my mind off these banana skins. Where were they coming from? Who was eating all these bananas and leaving the skins around? Why was it always bananas I was seeing, and not, say, oranges? Was it a sign? Was there something sinister going on? Apparently these little hazards were a covert operation going completely unnoticed; everyone I asked about it said that they had never noticed anything of the sort and looked at me as if I was nuts.”

I buy it.

By the way, you really can slip on a discarded banana peel – in fact, the hazard was so real back when the fruit was introduced about a century ago that cities enacted ordinances against discarding the fruit’s outer skin. The reason so many banana wrappers were left laying around? Spectacular popularity: the early banana marketers were so good at building demand for the fruit that municipalities were literally overwhelmed with an unexpected glut of rotting, slippery waste. Simply put: there weren’t enough trash cans to hold all the banana peels. No kidding, There’s a whole section about it in my book; you can also hear my talk about it in my Fresh Air interview, linked above.

Via Boing-Boing .