Tag: Wild bananas

Wild bananas are filled with large, hard seeds and contain very little edible fruit, a stark contrast to the seedless fruit found in grocery stores today. The bananas we enjoy are the result of thousands of years of human cultivation, breeding, and genetic selection.

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.

While the bananas you find at the grocery store are famously seedless due to selective breeding, their wild ancestors were filled with large, hard seeds. This has led many to wonder: can we eat bananas with seeds, particularly if they encounter a seeded variety? The answer depends entirely on the type of banana you are eating.