P365 – Day 97 bananas

This is something we’ve seen much less of in our house recently.

The price of bananas has – to use a popular media term – skyrocketed in the past few weeks. This is due to the loss of much of Queensland’s banana crop following the devastating Tropical Cyclone Yasi, which hit Far North Queensland in February. It was one of the worst cyclones Australia has had, and followed severe flooding in much of Queensland a month earlier. It was quite surreal sitting at home in relative peace and quiet, knowing that people I knew were just waiting for this massive storm to hit, following it on the media and not quite grasping the extent of what was about to happen.

Since the loss of the banana crops, prices have been gradually increasing to the extent that bananas are a bit of a luxury item these days – although at $2.40, a single banana is on par with a chocolate bar, so by those standards still not too bad.

But they aren’t an everyday staple any more, which is bad luck for me. As someone who is not a big fan of fruit, I discovered that the best way for me to eat fruit is to make a smoothy – most of which involve bananas. That way I can mask the taste, which I don’t like, and the texture, which I absolutely can’t stand and can’t handle. So until recently, a fruit smoothy has been a pretty standard breakfast for me.

I guess now I have to go in search of other smoothy recipes! A bit of variety never hurt anyone though.

It will be interesting to see how high prices actually go over the next six months. So far this is the highest I’ve seen.