Understanding the Banana Tree

Part of the pull of coming to this amazing community in the jungles of Panama, for me, was to experience a food system working well for the people it was feeding. In other words, I wanted to see eating healthily be the most natural option; not a burden, an expense, or a hardship, as it is in many of the communities I have been in in the United States and other parts of the world. In my first week here, I wandered around the food forest, where pineapple plants, lemon trees, katuk (ka-TUK, an unbelievably delicious leafy green that's somewhat similar to spinach), arugula, aloe, mangosteen, okra, kale, and many, many more amazing foods are growing in harmony alongside each other. What stood out most was learning, by the farm manager that the  banana and plantain trees (female and male versions of the same plant, respectively) each grow a bunch of bananas/plantains once a year, and that's it. I kind of stopped in my tracks. Thinking about how many bananas we always see stacked high in the grocery store, and knowing that, naturally, a banana tree only produces about twenty bananas each year, and requires a good amount of labor, was eye-opening. When we eat a banana or plantain, we should stop and realize how incredible it is that we are able to enjoy it - how thankful to the plant we are, how thankful to the water, and how thankful to the farmer.
Understanding the labor that goes into our food is an important part of eating mindfully.