This s–t is bananas! 
 
 A Japanese agricultural research company has developed a banana with an edible peel. 
 
 Called the Mongee — pronounced “mon-gay,” which is slang for “incredible” in Japanese — the freaky fruit is grown using an extreme freezing and thawing process. According to D&T Farm’s spokesman Tetsuya Tanaka, the idea began as a research “hobby” for technical development manager Setsuzo Tanaka and evolved from there. 
 
 First, scientists plant and grow banana trees in an environment kept at negative 76 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, the team thaws and replants them. The change in temperature encourages the plants to rapidly grow, and leaves the fruit with a peel that has a texture like “lettuce,” Tetsuya says. (Regular bananas are usually grown in temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.) 
 
 D&T Farm claims they have exceptional nutritional qualities. “Banana peel is an excellent ingredient,” the company’s English website reads, adding that the peels may contain vitamin B6, magnesium and tryptophan. 
 
 That’s all good and well, but what do they taste like? 
 
 According to D&T’s website, Mongees are sweeter than their traditional relatives, with nearly five more grams of sugar per fruit. Tetsuya adds that, unlike the exterior of ordinary bananas, Mongees’ peels don’t taste bitter. 
 
 Journalists at the Tokyo-based website RocketNews24 tested them out last month and found that they had a “very strong tropical flavor,” like a pineapple. In an article, they describe the skin as “very thin,” with “no strange texture” and “fairly easy to eat.” 
 
 For comparison’s sake, a RocketNews24 reporter later bit into a regular banana — skin and all — from Ecuador. Predictably, he found the peel inedible. 
 
 Unfortunately, Mongees probably won’t be cropping up at C-Town anytime soon: Production costs are so high for these bananas, only 10 of them go on sale each week in an Okayama prefecture department store in western Japan, averaging at a wallet-busting $5.75 apiece. “We are also considering export [to the US], but it is likely [to take a while,]” Tetsuya says. ||||| Most of the world’s bananas are grown in tropical temperatures that consistently hover around 80°F (27°C), but D&T Farms in southern Japan keeps its banana trees at a frigid -76°F (-60°C). Then, the farmers replant the trees in an 80°F environment. The result of the wildly different temperatures is enough to encourage the plants to jolt into a state of rapid growth, producing a banana with a peel that doesn’t entirely mature, making it thin, soft, and sweet enough to eat along with the regular part of the fruit. 
 
 This bizarre method of production is called “freeze thaw awakening,” and results in a banana with a perfectly edible—even delicious—peel. The fruit—called the Mongee banana—is now available in extremely small, 10-banana batches sold each week in a regional Japanese retail outlet called Tenmanya Okayama. The fruit go for a whopping $6 per banana. Supplies of the banana are extremely limited, but the company is interested in expanding, as it recently posted job listings (in Japanese) on its website for new banana farmers. 
 
 As it is in many countries, the banana is the most popular fruit in Japan. And like most other countries, Japan imports the vast majority of bananas it consumes—99% to be exact. The Mongee banana could be a way to help grow that domestic 1% of the market. D&T Farms, based in the southern prefecture of Okayama, boasts on its website that it grows its bananas without pesticides and that the edible peel provides extra nutrients (some good, some bad), including tryptophan, vitamin B6, magnesium, zinc, and more sugar. 
 
 According to Japanese media, the Mongee banana has 24.8 grams of sugar, much more than the average banana’s 18 grams or so. Taste-testers at Rocket News 24 said the fruit had a very tropical taste to it, with a scent reminiscent of pineapple. ||||| We get our hands on the mystical Mongee Banana. 
 
 If you’ve ever been to a Japanese department store in August, when they’re selling mid-year gifts, you’ll know that fruit can fetch some pretty high prices in Japan. High-end fruit can cost upwards of the equivalent of US$100, and at any time of the year, even basic grocery store fruit like apples and pears can, for certain varieties, cost $2 or $3 each. Nevertheless, fruit makes up a delicious part of Japanese food culture, but what would you think is the most consumed fruit in Japan? 
 
 The banana, of course! It’s no wonder since it’s easy to eat, cheap, and tasty. Japan imports 99 percent of their bananas from overseas, but part of the one percent that is produced in Japan is the Mongee Banana (pronounced “mon-gay”). 
 
 The Mongee Banana is a very special banana. It’s only grown in Okayama Prefecture, and they only sell 10 bananas per week. One banana costs 648 yen (about US$5.75), but the most interesting thing about this banana is that you can eat the skin! 
 
 We were able to get their hands on some of these bananas, so they gave them a taste test. What does an edible banana peel taste like? Let’s find out! 
 
 About the mystical Mongee Banana 
 
 Mongee Bananas are produced at D&T Farm in Okayama Prefecture, in western Japan. Typically bananas only grow in tropical climates, but D&T Farms uses a method called “Freeze Thaw Awakening”, which extracts and implements the DNA of fruits in order to produce specimen similar to ancient times, which then allows them to be grown in a cooler climate. Bananas produced in this way were successfully grown for the first time in November. 
 
 Since they’re raised in a non-tropical climate, they don’t have any natural predators, which means no pesticides are used and Mongee Bananas are organically grown. They’re sweeter than regular bananas, with 24.8 grams of sugar, as opposed to the average 18.3 grams. Because of that, they’re also stickier and have a much stronger smell. That’s probably why they gave it the name “Mongee”, since “mongee” is Okayama slang for “incredible”. 
 
 You can only find Mongee Bananas in the Fruit Corner of Tenmanya Okayama, an Okayama department store. They only get one shipment per week of just 10 bananas, but they were generous enough to send us some for tasting. 
 
 The first thing we noticed: The skin is very thin 
 
 Actually, before we could eat the bananas we had to wait for them to ripen. Apparently, they’re only ready to eat when you start to see little brown dots on the surface of the skin, unlike regular bananas, which are ripe before this stage. The Mongee Bananas took about two days after arrival to ripen. Meanwhile, the smell was getting stronger and more tempting. 
 
 Once it was ripe, Japanese-language correspondent P.K. Sanjun’s first inclination was to bite straight into the banana, but he suppressed his animal desires and first tried it like a regular banana. Upon peeling it he realized that the skin is relatively thin compared to a regular banana, so he thought it was reasonably edible-looking. 
 
 With a rising excitement he bit into the fleshy innards of the banana…and found it has a very strong tropical flavor. P.K. even said it’s almost pineapple-like, with a scent that just wafts right up through your nose to hit your taste buds. It’s definitely not a normal banana. 
 
 The edible skin 
 
 Next the crew wanted to try the skin, so P.K. sliced up another banana with the skin still on. On the first bite we noticed that the skin is fairly easy to eat. Since it’s very thin, there’s no strange texture, and compared to the sweetness of the banana there isn’t much flavor to the skin. So the Mongee Banana truly does have an edible skin. Mongee!! 
 
 ▼ Though some of our staff enjoyed it more than others. 
 
 ▼ P.K. was the only one brave enough to just eat the skin…he said it was bitter, but not inedible. His face reveals his real thoughts about eating a banana peel, though. 
 
 To really understand how special the edible skin was, P.K. went to the convenience store and bought an ordinary banana, imported from Ecuador, with the intention of trying the skin. But that was a mistake…it was far too tough and fibrous, and the flavor was far more bitter and astringent. Conclusion: regular banana peels are not meant to be eaten. They might also be covered in pesticides, so we really don’t recommend eating them. 
 
 So let it be known, the Mongee Banana is definitely special! This top class, genetically enhanced, tropical-flavored banana is probably going to be difficult to get your hands on, but if you find yourself in Okayama, be sure to take a peek in Tenmanya. These bananas are really “mongee”. Oh, and in other strange food news, apparently dropping a raw egg in your coffee is a thing. Who knew?! 
 
 Images ©SoraNews24 
 
 [ Read in Japanese ] ||||| Illustration: Sam Woolley 
 
 Midway through her first-round match at the Australian Open this year, world No. 10 CoCo Vandeweghe refused to return to the court until someone brought her a banana. 
 
 
 
 “I’m waiting for the banana. How are they not on court? I mean, c’mon, that’s not my fault,” Vandeweghe told chair umpire Fergus Murphy. 
 
 
 
 “Let’s play!” an annoyed Murphy said into his microphone, clearly fed up with Vandeweghe. 
 
 
 
 “Well now they’re here,” said Vandeweghe, noticing that a fresh batch of fruit had finally appeared courtside. “Mind if I take a bite?” 
 
 “No, you don’t have time now,” Murphy warned, but a defiant Vandeweghe had already started eating one of the bananas. 
 
 
 
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 “Code violation: delay of game. Warning, Miss Vandeweghe.” 
 
 
 
 Vandeweghe was roundly mocked in the press for holding up the match this way. “CoCo goes bananas,” read one ESPN headline. People couldn’t understand how a professional tennis player could become so invested in a single banana. But this wasn’t the first time this had happened. 
 
 
 
 After a second-round match at the 1998 Rome Masters, Félix Mantilla was so pissed off at Thomas Muster that he refused to shake his hand. The reason? Earlier during a changeover, Muster had run up to Mantilla, snatched the banana from his hands, and eaten it. 
 
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 At the 2006 U.S. Open, Maria Sharapova was accused of receiving illegal coaching after her father started waving a banana at her from the stands, apparently trying remind her to eat banana. 
 
 “I believe, at the end of the day, personally, my life is not about a banana,” Sharapova told reporters after she won the final. 
 
 
 
 If only this were true. The lives of professional tennis players are very much about bananas. They’re the most popular snack on tour, and tennis players consume more of them than maybe any other pro athlete. 
 
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 “All tennis players eat like five bananas a day,” Eugenie Bouchard told the Sunday Express last year at Wimbledon, where tens of thousands of the fruit are consumed every tournament. 
 
 
 
 “It’s almost like a ritual,” the ATP’s head nutritionist Page Love told me. 
 
 If you want proof of the enduring popularity of the banana in tennis, talk to Love about her attempts to convince tour pros to try any other kind of snack other than bananas. 
 
 
 
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 “Suzie [Simmons] and I tend to be the ones that review the tournament supply [of on-court snacks] and there is plenty of stuff in there. We like tournaments to have numerous types of energy bars, crackers, all kinds of fruits, granola bars. Tons of stuff.” 
 
 
 
 Love doesn’t think bananas are the best on-court snack, and often recommends that players try some of the carb-heavier, saltier foods in the basket, like pretzels and energy bars. But most players stubbornly refuse to let go of their bananas. 
 
 
 
 “For some reason, and I don’t know where this has come from, some tennis players think they need high-potassium foods on court. I think [that’s] a misunderstanding of the science. The primary electrolyte we lose in sweat is salt, not potassium.” 
 
 
 
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 Love isn’t the first person to question the suitability of the banana as an on-court snack. 
 
 
 
 In fact, up until recently, the banana wasn’t a popular tennis snack at all. Just a few decades ago, the idea of eating a banana on court during a professional tennis match wasn’t just unpopular: It was laughable. 
 
 The Vindication Of The Banana 
 
 “I think the embryonic stages of the ‘banana resurgence’ did occur because of my initial work. Because of the amount of press I got, it was able to kind of get out in the public conscious.” 
 
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 These are the words of Robert Haas, a sports nutritionist who gained attention in the early ‘80s after world No. 1 Martina Navratilova hired him to overhaul her diet. (He also worked for Cher, with whom he wrote a book.) Navratilova won 102 of her next 104 matches on this new diet, which included lots of on-court bananas, which Haas liked to say were “better than Gatorade.” 
 
 
 
 Haas told me he started telling players to carry bananas around in their bags in the ‘70s, when he realized that they were the perfect on-court snack. 
 
 “I would tell the players, ‘Look, here’s a banana, carry it with you in your bag. If it’s a five-set Grand Slam event, carry two bananas with you. You’re going to want these at critical periods, because it’ll restore electrolytes, and it’ll give you a shot of carbohydrate.’” 
 
 
 
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 “I was kind of like the Johnny Appleseed of bananas.” 
 
 
 
 Why the banana, of all the foods? 
 
 
 
 “I had been working with a computer programmer, back when computers were the size of houses. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got this idea: Why don’t we get a [food nutrition] database from the government, and you write a routine that will allow me to do all kinds of searches and organize foods based on a nutritional breakdown?’” 
 
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 Haas ran the program on a computer at Florida State University, feeding it nutritional data in the hopes that it would yield the perfect on-court snack. 
 
 
 
 “I started looking for ideal combinations of nutrients for athletes, like magnesium, potassium and choline,” he said. “Only one food out of all the things that I searched came up with a pretty good ratio of nutrients, and that was the banana. 
 
 “As far as I know, I was the very first one to ever use a massive computer to actually analyze these kinds of things and find out the ideal food for a particular application. That was 1976.” 
 
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 Haas said that many people laughed at him when he pitched his nutritional advice to pros in the ‘70s. 
 
 
 
 “When I first started trying to tell people about [bananas] and sports nutrition in general, none of them would listen. Everything I was doing was being mocked at the time. The banana began kind of like that. As like, an outcast. 
 
 
 
 “So to me, the banana has been been vindicated.” 
 
 
 
 A Huge Opportunity Emerges 
 
 If at this point you’re confused about which parts of banana nutrition are backed by actual science and which parts aren’t, you’re not alone. 
 
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 One reason why some coaches and nutritionists today try to steer tennis players away from bananas is because they believe the sugars in bananas aren’t taken up by the body quickly enough during exercise to result in any kind of energy boost. Love herself told me something to this effect. 
 
 
 
 “I think it’s a mistake for players to rely on bananas because it doesn’t provide as quick of energy—fructose doesn’t break down as quickly as something like the maltodextrins that are in the sport foods. I think it’s honestly just a common misunderstanding of the science.” 
 
 
 
 The problem with this is that a lot of the science around the uptake of sugars during exercise is sponsored by Gatorade, which wants to convince us that drinking pure maltodextrin (of which you can buy a 50-pound bag for 70 bucks here [or as the active ingredient in a 5-liter tub here marketed as “Majestik,” a “fast acting, contact pesticide”]) is good. In the resulting thicket of sugar drink-sponsored and -influenced research, it’s hard to determine which sugar sources are actually good or bad. 
 
 
 
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 Sure, fructose breaks down slower than other sugars. But according to the USDA’s National Nutrient Database, of the 14.43 g of total sugars found in a medium-sized banana, only 5.72 grams are fructose. (5.88 g are glucose and 2.82 g are sucrose.) 
 
 And in 2012, Appalachian State University professor David Nieman published a study claiming that the sugars in bananas are, in fact, just as fast-acting and energy-providing during athletic activity as the sugars found in Gatorade. The study found that cyclists fueled by banana and sports drink were “able to complete 75-km cycling trials with no differences in performance measures.” 
 
 
 
 Here, finally, was definitive proof of the banana’s efficacy as an on-court snack. The missing piece in the banana nutrition puzzle. 
 
 
 
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 “Yes, hi. I have you on speaker,” Nieman told me when I called him to talk about his banana study. 
 
 
 
 “I’m here with [study co-author] Dr. Nick Gillit, he’s the Vice President of the Dole Nutrition Research Institute. We’ve done a lot of research together on bananas, and he can answer questions that I can’t.” 
 
 
 
 Admittedly, finding out that this study was sponsored by the Dole Food Company initially felt like a bit of a setback. 
 
 
 
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 “I think the future of sports nutrition is figuring out what these fruit molecules do for the athletes,” Nieman said at one point in the conversation. 
 
 How reliable could research about fruit backed by the world’s largest fruit company really be? 
 
 
 
 But the more I thought about it, the more all of this began to feel like a huge opportunity. Who better to take on Gatorade than Big Banana? 
 
 
 
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 So I asked Gillit whether he though Dole bananas could ever unseat Gatorade as the fuel source of choice for pro athletes, and he immediately started to think out loud about the possibilities: 
 
 
 
 “[Gatorade] does have a ginormous marketing machine. Sponsorships of athletes, sponsorships of teams. So—not that banana companies like Dole and Chiquita and Del Monte are ever gonna start endorsing athletes and things, you know. They could, but I don’t think the companies that sell bananas are really into athletic sponsorship.” 
 
 
 
 “But I think you might need that if you want to turn the tide a little bit, a sponsorship of a sports team or sponsorship of a particular athlete. I think the science is there for somebody to make that decision wholeheartedly and truthfully, and I think the marketing is going to determine all of it. But I don’t know whether that is there with the banana.” 
 
 
 
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 Gillit paused. 
 
 “I wish it was! But I don’t think banana companies are ready to go down that road.” 
 
 
 
 He paused again. 
 
 
 
 “If they did, they would have absolute scientific fact to stand on. That’s for sure.” 
 
 
 
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 Absolute scientific fact. This was huge news. 
 
 
 
 I Honestly Think Dole Bananas Have What It Takes To Take On Gatorade 
 
 I immediately got in touch with Xavier Roussel, VP of Marketing at Dole, to discuss potential ways Dole could move forward with me and Gillit’s proposal. 
 
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 Roussel was a bit less enthusiastic about the idea of getting into sports endorsements than Gillit. He explained that because retailers mainly compete on price when it comes to fruits and vegetables, produce companies generally have much thinner margins than consumer packaged goods (CPGs) like Gatorade, which means less money for big splashy marketing expenses like athlete endorsements. 
 
 
 
 “Having said that, you know, there are a bunch of athletes out there that would probably align on health and nutrition and natural foods, we would have no issues aligning with them,” Roussel told me. 
 
 
 
 What kinds of athletes are we talking here? 
 
 
 
 “To get high visibility, you need really high-profile. So there are not that many people who can do it. In marketing, you know, it’s all about how famous you are. Those highly visible athletes, they of course are courted by all of the brands, with high budgets and therefore, let’s say it is not something that produce does traditionally.” 
 
 
 
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 So if we’re going to compete against Gatorade, we’re going to need to endorse someone big? Someone with high visibility? 
 
 
 
 “If. If.” 
 
 Right. 
 
 
 
 “We see that as a category overall, we see consumers very receptive to the health and nutrition message. That’s a big mega-trend that goes through our product category. The way we market, we have a very high level of penetration, I mean a product like bananas is bought once a year by over 90 percent of the population. It’s a product for each and every one, right? Bananas is a product that everybody enjoys.” 
 
 
 
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 Roussel was right—bananas are a product that everyone enjoys. But it felt like we were beating around the bush a little bit here. So I asked him point-blank: could Dole ever compete with Gatorade in the sports fuel market, head-on? 
 
 “It’s not something we try ... healthy choices in people’s lives are not necessarily made against something. We don’t really try to get fruit and veg to be more, how can I say... contentious.” 
 
 
 
 Roussel might not think that fruit and veg needs to be more “contentious,” but I do. 
 
 
 
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 I am confident that banana companies like Dole have what it takes to launch a muscular consumer packaged goods (CPG)-style marketing campaign positioning bananas as a direct competitor to Gatorade. 
 
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 Nick Zarzycki is a writer living in Toronto.
– About the only thing banana peels were good for up to this point were comedy pratfalls and composting. A farm in Japan appears to have changed that, producing a banana with a tasty edible peel thanks to what Quartz labels a "bizarre method of production." The technique used by D&T Farm to create the Mongee banana is called "freeze thaw awakening." The process involves starting banana trees out in an environment that's nearly minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit, then moving the trees with their still-ripening bananas to a more temperate climate of around 80 degrees—an environment banana trees typically grow in the entire time. The extreme temperature variation puts the banana's growth into a sort of hyperspeed mode, so the peel doesn't fully mature, leaving it with a texture like "lettuce," a D&T Farm spokesman says, per the New York Post. Taste-testers for the RocketNews24 site in Japan say the banana fruit itself—which has about 5 more grams of sugar per banana than the regular version—boasts a "very strong tropical flavor" akin to that of a pineapple, but using the descriptor "edible" for the skin may need tweaking. Although it's said not to have a "strange texture" and is "fairly easy to eat," the tasters add there "isn't much flavor"; one experimenter even said it was somewhat bitter, though not as much so as the peels of regular bananas, which he also tasted. Not that most people will get to sample it: The Mongee banana, which comes in batches of 10, is currently being sold in just one regional Japanese outlet, with each banana going for around $6. (These scientists flew across the world on a failed banana quest.)