a color story: green banana, yellow banana, brown banana

I saw a banana on the kitchen counter. It was green. It was yellow. Now, it was turning brown. Quite the transformation. The peel colors almost resembled a traffic light.

For a fruit, the banana told a colorful story. I wanted to know more. 

It was shocking.

Bananas don't come out of grocery stores. These tropical fruits come out of trees and the Cavendish bananas were the most commercial- slightly sweet and creamy texture. Bananas, also, came in red and blue varieties. 

The bananas started off green due to the abundance of chlorophyll, a green pigment found in other plants like grass and spinach. The banana's chlorophyll used the sunlight to produce the fruit's beige flesh. Green signaled "let me grow".

When a plant hormone, ethylene production surged in the banana, the chlorophyll goes away, revealing their yellow hues. Ethylene was a ripening hormone. The peels naturally softened and thinned, making it easier to get to the beige flesh. Ethylene also caused the banana to turn the starch into sugar. This was why the yellow banana tasted sweet. Yellow yelled "I'm ready". 

Ethylene production continued and the banana will go through senescence , a self destruction where the yellow eventually turns into black. The chewy flesh turned into mush and the peel thinned out. Brown whispered "It's time".

The plant hormone, ethylene triggered the banana's color changes. The banana was still very much alive. I wondered what "pro-life" vegetarians would think if they knew that hormones affected the banana's color. 

"Pro-life except for bananas. How am I going to eat my oat meal with oat milk?"

I kid. I kid. Of course. Bananas display more "emotions" than a cow ever will. 

On the kitchen counter, the bananas "threatened" the other fruits because it knew that it could spread its ethylene gas. The brown banana ripened other fruits. via ethylene.  I placed the over-ripe bananas to a corner. It needed it a "time-out". Anger was a stage of grief, after all.