Secular Pinoy

Hahaha! Yes, durian, the bane of airports everywhere. My dad in his trip to Indonesia a while back had the gall to bring a few durian fruits back home. His luggage stanked for a week. I haven't tasted the fruit itself, but dried durian chips (from Thailand) are quite tasty.

And if I remember correctly, durians cannot be sold in air-conditioned or closed public places, like malls, in Singapore.

Stephen T-B

Jesus Freak - I HATE bananas. Bananas make me sick. What's going on here? If bananas are intelligently designed, does that I am UNintelligently designed?

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Stephen T-B ]</p>

MrDarwin

The banana most certainly was created for humans. By whom? By humans. The banana has been selectively bred from several different wild species for thousands of years. Commercial bananas are sterile triploids that do not produce seeds. Has anybody here ever tried eating a wild banana? They're small, hard to peel and full of hard black seeds like buckshot that will break your teeth if you're not careful. You have to sort of mush them up in your mouth, suck off the pulp, and spit out the seeds. How's that for design?

Hey, how about pufferfish (a.k.a. fugu)? Now there's an example of a well-designed food!

(Edited to say d'oh! Talking Rain beat me to it on banana origins.)

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

MrDarwin

Haven't you ever eaten a well-aged stinky cheese? (Personally I've never been able to eat swiss cheese, as the smell reminds me too much of foot odor.)

aofl

Mmmmmmmmmm. Foot Odor.

Denshuu

Foot odor was made specifically to fit the human hand.
Therefore...

Doubting Didymus

I notice Jesus Freak is conspicuous by his absence. I wonder if he even read our responses? I bet he was just too damn smug to bother.

I especially like the responses above about bananas being selectively bred by humans, for humans, from fruit that were practically useless to humans. I didn't know that. Perhaps god knew what we were going to do with the horrible little things in advance?

Xyzzy

I was not aware that bannanas were "Navel Oranges" of the tropical fruit world, but it's true.

<a href="http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Musa/" target="_blank">http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Musa/</a>

It's too bad the news hasn't filtered around to all the creationist web sites with this silly article.

seanie

MrDarwin

Your post about bananas being created by humans reminded me of something I found out only recently.

Carrots were invented by the Dutch.


From the following site.

<a href="http://website.lineone.net/~stolarczyk/history.html" target="_blank">http://website.lineone.net/~stolarczyk/history.html</a>

To unravel the long history of the Carrot you have to go back a very long way. The carrot dates back about 5,000 years ago when the root was found to be growing in the area now known as Afghanistan. Temple drawings from Egypt in 2000 BC show a purple plant, which some Egyptologists believe to be a purple carrot. Throughout the centuries Arab merchants travelled the trade routes of Arabia, Asia and Africa bringing home to their villages the seeds of the purple carrot. During these years the vegetable appeared in a variety of hues ranging from purple to white, pale yellow, red, green and black.

In Roman times carrots were purple or white. By the 10th century purple carrots were grown in Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern Iran. Moorish invaders are thought to have brought the purple and yellow variety from North Africa to Southern Europe around the 12th century. By the 13th century carrots are known to have grown in the fields of Germany and France.

Purple, white and yellow carrots were imported to southern Europe in the 14th century. Black, red and green carrots were also grown. Flemish refugees eventually introduced the vegetable to the shores of England in the 15th century. Orange roots, containing the pigment carotene, were not noted until the 16th century in Holland. This only came about thanks to patriotic Dutch growers who bred the vegetable to grow in the colours of the House of Orange. By the 1700s Holland was considered the leading country in carrot breeding and today's "modern" orange version is directly descended from the Dutch-bred carrots of this time. In an attempt to "nationalize" the country's favourite vegetable they began experiments on improving the pale yellow versions. These were crossed with red varieties containing anthocyanin to produce orange-coloured roots. Successive hybridization intensified the widely recognized "orange" colour of today.

Just thought people might find that interesting.