This Story is Bananas

One banana, two banana, three banana, four….

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

ONE BANANA

Bananas and sour cream. If you’d asked me at age 5 to name my favorite food, that would’ve been my answer, no pondering involved.

I would eat it every day. For breakfast. For lunch. For dinner. For dessert. Not all on the same day — I wasn’t a weirdo kid. I ate other things too. Pancakes, hot dogs, grilled cheese. Normal stuff. I’m just stating the flexibility of bananas and sour cream.

My mom would take a solid yellow banana — no brown spots, no hint of green — remove the peel and slice it into a dozen or more bite-sized segments, then toss them in a cereal bowl with several dollops of Daisy Brand sour cream. The ratio of sour cream to banana, if I was aware of ratios at that age, would ideally be one to one.

It’s a ratio that I continue to use today, but with greek yogurt and granola instead of banana and sour cream. And I always add berries or any additional fruit last to make sure that the granola-yogurt balance is just right.

Whenever I’m at a Starbucks or a cafe or a take-out store that sells pre-made yogurt “parfait,” they never get the ratio right. It’s always way too much yogurt or way too many blueberries. Or too much strawberry goop, or whatever viscous jelly is used to emulate fresh fruit. It’s one reason why I gained fifteen pounds when I was working as a video editor in downtown San Francisco pre-pandemic. Every morning on my way to the office I would end up eating a muffin or coffee cake instead of the yogurt parfait, both as a moral response and as a political act to combat those horribly uneven ratios.

Sure, sitting in front of a computer screen for 8–10 hours a day probably played a role in my body thickening, but I would rather blame the evil corporate ratio-destroying machine.

Photo by Daniel Cabriles on Unsplash; also, a perfectly balanced parfait

While googling ‘bananas and sour cream’, the autofill wanted to add “Jewish” to the search. My first reaction was an urge to publicly shame Google and reveal their anti-Semitic underpinnings. Or at least accuse them of trafficking in stereotypes.

But then I paused, took a deep breath and wondered if maybe this childhood favorite snack-meal actually was a Jewish thing. I had never really considered bananas and sour cream a religious or culturally Jewish food, but it does make sense. I don’t recall my WASPy friends eating bananas and sour cream. Not together. Now that I’m thinking about it, I do remember getting strange looks at school when I would open my Evil Knievel lunch box and pull out a tupperware filled with bananas and sour cream at school. Maybe all along it was the tolerated 2nd cousin dish to matzo ball soup, noodle kugel and potato latkes.

My innocent youth, or what I like to call The Banana and Sour Cream Years (ages 2–13) lasted for more than a decade because it was something I could make by myself. As soon as I was tall enough or agile enough to reach/climb up to the second highest shelf on the fridge which housed the plastic tub of sour cream, I could prepare my own bowl of B&SC. I could chop up the banana with the side of a spoon. No knives need be involved. Assembling my own bananas and sour cream felt like a rite of passage, a way of proving my independence. I didn’t need Mommy to make my meals for me. At least not all of them.

But by the 6th or 7th grade, I began to develop a distaste for sour cream. I no longer wanted it associating with my bananas. I didn’t like it spread atop my potato pancakes. I definitely didn’t like it in or on my burritos. I don’t recall this change of taste having any bullying origins or it being connected to any traumatic incident (The Sour Cream Incident: in theaters this Friday!), but I plan to explore this possibility in therapy to see if I have any repressed memories around it. I’ll report back with my findings.

What’s more likely the source of my sudden anti-sour cream stance was receiving a medical diagnosis of lactose intolerance after months (years really) of gastrointestinal distress. Cramping, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation — the whole kit and kaboodle. I was advised to avoid eating dairy.

In 1980 you’d have better luck finding the holy grail than a 12 year old boy who was willing and able to cut milk, pizza, ice-cream and cheese from his diet. Soy milk was years from becoming a grocery staple and could only be found in hippie co-op markets for twenty bucks a pint. Or at least that was the impression from suburban California.

My best guess is that I stopped eating sour cream as a token sacrifice to the altar of lactose intolerance. And then that evolved into a genuine dislike.

TWO BANANA

If you had asked me as a young adult to name my favorite fruit I would have answered “banana!” without hesitation. Though I’d excised sour cream from my diet during adolescence, I did not cut bananas out.

In fact, my banana eating ways only expanded as I got older. I no longer demanded that the peels be solid yellow without a hint of green. I was okay with a couple of small soft spots. A dozen or so irregularly shaped brown freckles? Not my ideal preference, but I’d eat it as long as it held relative firmness.

Ripening beyond that? Let’s make some banana bread!

Photo by Teo Do Rio on Unsplash

In my freezer you will always find a bag of sliced bananas. I use them most often for smoothies but their most important role is as conductor ingredient for my banana breads.

I’ve got a half dozen banana bread recipes dog eared in cookbooks such as Laurel’s Kitchen, Secrets of a Jewish Baker, and a variety of Moosewood volumes. I have several more banana bread recipes bookmarked on Epicurious and Eating Well.

I am not a very good cook. (Not a naturally good cook that is, but if I have time and all the ingredients and don’t have to improvise, I’m decent.) But I can rock a tasty banana bread like nobody’s business. Lactose intolerant? I’ve got three wonderful dairy-free recipes. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity? Let me call up a rice-millet-buckwheat flour recipe you will love. Want to limit fats? Well, you should probably stay away from my banana bread, but I do have a great low-sugar recipe that uses ground flaxseed and ground oats that is tasty and gives a wonderfully false sense of heart-healthiness!

Just don’t ask me to add nuts. Nuts are to be eaten on their own, not inside of bread. Chocolate chips, though? Most definitely.

THREE BANANA

If you were to have asked me what my favorite TV show was when I was four years old, I don’t know what my answer would have been, but I can be sure it wasn’t The Banana Splits Adventure Hour.

This surreal, live-action children’s show from the minds of Hannah Barbara and copious amounts of acid only aired for three years, between 1968 and 1970. (The first season was directed by Richard Donner of Goonies and Lethal Weapon fame!) I’m pretty confident my parents didn’t put 2 or 3 year-old me down in front the the TV to watch The Banana Splits.

I do remember, though, watching it when I was a sophomore in high school and a straight-A stoner student. I’m pretty sure that by the early 80s The Banana Splits was considered a cult classic and rightly seen as appropriate only for marijuana smoking adults and teenagers, airing at midnight or 1am, right after Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert. Then again, I was quite high back then, so any memories I claim to have should come with a warning to accept all “facts” with a grain of smoke.

The costumes and sets for The Banana Splits were designed by Sid and Marty Krofft, and the series’ sponsor was Kellogg’s Cereals (which I ate dutifully). If you are under the age of 50, you likely will not understand the widespread influence Sid and Marty Krofft had on children’s TV programming during the 1970s. Shows like H.R. Pufnstuf , Land of the Lost and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters were weekend morning boob-tube staples for simple minded youngsters like me.

In 2009, Land of the Lost was adapted into a movie starring Will Ferrell and Danny McBride that was pretty terrible. It was never going to be good; the budget was too high. The best hope for filmic remakes of low-budget childhood heirlooms is that they are so bad they become cult classics. That’s what made them so good in the first place! The fact of the matter is that none of us who grew up watching the Sid and Marty Krofft shows are watching them now in our 50s. Or maybe some of us are — those still living in their parents’ basements.

My favorite of the Krofft shows was always Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, so my harsh, critical attitude is partially due to the fact that my least favorite (Land of the Lost) was the one made into a film.

(Note: after writing that last paragraph I decided to see if any Sigmund and the Sea Monsters were available on YouTube. There are. Without taking back what I said, I want to emphasize that Sigmund and the Sea Monsters WAS my favorite Sid and Marty Krofft series. Watching it again now is um….what’s the right word? Challenging. Yeah that’s a good word. Not even being stoned would make the show watchable. I think being an 8-year-old boy in 1974 is my only excuse. Oh, and yes, the show was indeed remade in 2016 as a kids series that can be streamed now on Amazon Prime.)

All this is background information for the fact that the Banana Splits TV show was more memorable for its annoyingly earworm-laden theme song than the contents of the show itself. Which has been repeating ad nauseam in my head all week. I only have myself to blame for this as I was making a playlist on Spotify on bands and artists with fruit in their names (Fiona Apple, The Cranberries, Strawberry Alarm Clock, for example). And in my search, the Banana Splits theme song appeared and then I played it and, well, it has kept on playing on my built-in player.

Here’s the playlist I made if you want to see what other fruity bands and artists made my cut of favorites.

I probably don’t need to do a line by line dissection of the lyrics to the Banana Splits song, it’s partly in the subtitle of this piece, but I’ll give you a few lines so you can see its appeal: (Get it? A peel? I’ll show myself out.)

One banana, two banana, three banana, four

Four bananas make a split and so do many more

Over hill and highway the banana buggies go

Come along to bring you the Banana Splits Show

And those lyrics comprise most of my earworm, but more than the song’s “words,” it’s the “Tra la la, Tra la la la/Tra la la, Tra la la la,” that won’t let go. How can two little nonsense syllables cause so much sonic torture?

FOUR BANANAS

If you were to have asked me between writing the 3rd and 4th banana sections if they (the mysterious “they”) ever made a Banana Splits movie, I would have answered with a fairly confident no.

Well, oopsie!

When I said before that my least favorite Sid and Marty Krofft show (Land of the Lost) was the only one made into a movie? I hadn’t done my due diligence.

I don’t know how it took almost 50 years to make a horror movie version of one these iconic shows. Especially the Banana Splits Show which just screams out Meet The Feebles.

Before Heavenly Creatures, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Beatles documentary series on Disney Plus, director Peter Jackson was mostly known for making graphically violent puppet films. Sort of like if The Muppets were hedonistic, murderous crazies. Meet the Feebles is actually pretty subversive and darkly funny in addition to being bonkers. But I was in college when I first saw it, still in my stoner student years (ages 14–23), so take “brilliant” with (all together now) a grain of smoke.

I cannot vouch for the brilliance of The Banana Splits Movie though. I would say that it’s probably better than Land of the Lost. It looks like it kept to the low-budget ethos of the original late 60s-early 70s show, which is the right approach. I will not watch it, though, because I do not want my joyously innocent musical impressions of Bingo, Snorky, Drooper and Fleegle to be forever besmirched.

Can’t we just let kids be kids? Even when they are in their 50s?

I don’t know how this game is played, but if you want to get me a birthday present, here’s a clue!