Tag: Banana seeds

According to the FDA, in most cases, it is perfectly safe to eat a ripe or even overripe banana, including the dark parts, as long as it is not visibly moldy. The dark spots, whether on the peel or the flesh, are usually a natural sign of ripening and not an indication of spoilage. However, there are a few rare instances where caution is advised.

According to botanists, bananas are technically classified as berries, and while the commercial varieties we enjoy today appear seedless, their wild ancestors were packed with hard, black seeds. This remarkable transformation from seedy to seedless is a testament to thousands of years of human ingenuity through selective breeding. The small, dark specks you might see in a store-bought banana are merely vestigial remnants of what was once a functional seed.

Over 7,000 years of domestication have transformed the banana from a fruit full of large, hard seeds into the seedless variety we know today. These small black specks that occasionally appear are not viable seeds, but the vestigial remnants of a wilder past.

Over 70% of bananas consumed globally are the seedless Cavendish variety, yet many people still encounter tiny black specks or a dark central core inside the fruit. The black part inside a banana can be several different things, including immature seeds, harmless bruising, or a sign of overripening or fungal infection.

Wild bananas, the ancestors of our supermarket fruit, are full of large, hard, unpalatable seeds. Today's commercial bananas, however, are a product of thousands of years of selective breeding and are virtually seedless. So, while the answer to 'do bananas have little black seeds in them?' is technically yes, they are infertile and undeveloped remnants.