Bananas make for big headlines — no, really

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/02/2019 (2727 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With the revised Canada’s Food Guide going to bat for fruit, this seems like the perfect time to launch a hard-hitting new feature: bananas in the news!

Obviously, I have a pro-banana bias, but I suspect the rest of you will enjoy this feature as well because, journalistically speaking, it has appeal.

But we don’t have time for stupid banana-related puns today, because there is a heaping helping of breaking banana news on our plate, starting with… banana-based self-defence systems.

Unless you have been in a coma for the past week, you know bananas have made headlines around the world because the owner of a Mississauga, Ont., convenience store used a bunch to batter a burglar trying to rob her business.

According to dozens of breathless news reports, 69-year-old Seungae Kim, who co-owns the store with her husband, Iksoo Kim, was behind the counter Saturday night, innocently eating a banana, when a man walked in with his face covered and demanded she open the cash register.

When she told him, “You’re not getting money,” the bad guy tried to vault the counter to get to the till. Which is when Seungae sprang into action.

In the moment, she said, she couldn’t think of anything other than trying to find a weapon she could use to defend her husband. Conveniently, a batch of bananas was within reach, so she started hitting the man until he stopped climbing the counter, and then bolted.

To be precise, after being battered with bananas, he split.

“I had to do something, so I reached for whatever was there,” the feisty store owner told the Toronto Star. “I hit him hard with the bananas and he ran away.”

I have watched the security video of this incident online and Seungae bashed the suspect with bananas until he retreated and then she flung a few of the yellow tropical torpedoes at him as he ran out of the store empty-handed.

I was moved to read James Johnson, a longtime customer, dropped by the store after hearing about the incident on the news and had a banana signed to commemorate Seungae’s heroism.

“I think it was brave,” Johnson said. “In the moment, of course, the first thing she could grab was the bananas. What else can you get?”

We can only hope that, in the future, would-be banana burglars will think twice when they assume an innocent store owner is ripe for the picking.

Which brings us to our next banana-signing news item, one that proved to be a royal pain for Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.

Dozens of banana-intensive news reports state Meghan was packing lunches last week for a charity that helps vulnerable women get off the streets.

Which is when the duchess decided instead of writing encouraging notes on pieces of paper, she would write uplifting words of encouragement on the peels of bananas included in the meals.

Using a black pen, she wrote “You are brave!” “You are strong!” “You are loved!” and “You are special!” in bold letters on the banana peels.

Some critics later blasted the banana messages as “really stupid,” but we are happy to come to her defence because, like the duchess and her husband — who had pondered having a banana-flavoured wedding cake — we are also bonkers for bananas.

In our house, we always have dozens of bananas lying on the counter, none of which get eaten, which results in the bananas turning black, which results in my wife stuffing them into our overcrowded refrigerator freezer to save for some future date when she promises to make banana bread.

The promised banana bread never seems to happen, but what does happen is I will open the freezer door looking for ice cream, at which point a number of rock-hard frozen bananas will leap out and slam themselves kamikaze-style into my unprotected feet.

Which is why I walk with a limp, but that is not the point. No, the point is we need to move on to our next frozen banana item, which comes to us from South Dakota, where a weatherman used the beloved fruit to reveal the importance of wrapping up during the current cold snap.

According to a gaggle of news reports, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls made a video in which he left two bananas outside in the brutal cold for several minutes, one of them peeled and the other safely tucked inside its canary-yellow casing.

At the end of three minutes, the peeled banana was (dramatic pause) frozen solid, whereas the other banana, the one protected by its peel, was still mushy. The message: wrap up warmly if you want to be mushy on the inside.

We are almost out of space, so there isn’t room to tell you that, in the new TV ad for the upcoming Avengers: Endgame movie, when Captain America says, “Some people move on. But not us,” some fans are instead hearing: “Some people move on bananas!”

It sounds bananas to us, but the important thing is I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: “Gee, Doug, that sure is a lot of banana-related news for one day.”

You are right, but we should not be surprised. Because when bananas make the news, it always happens in bunches.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca