Nevertheless, fruit makes up a delicious part of Japanese food culture, but what would you think is the most consumed fruit in Japan? 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”). 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. A Japanese agricultural research company has developed a banana with an edible peel. 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. 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. According to D&T’s website, Mongees are sweeter than their traditional relatives, with nearly five more grams of sugar per fruit. 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. 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. 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. Taste-testers at Rocket News 24 said the fruit had a very tropical taste to it, with a scent reminiscent of pineapple. The Mongee banana could be a way to help grow that domestic 1% of the market. was the only one brave enough to just eat the skin…he said it was bitter, but not inedible. Tetsuya adds that, unlike the exterior of ordinary bananas, Mongees’ peels don’t taste bitter.
– 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.)