Sitting and staring out the window yesterday afternoon at the rain and wind, I mused at the sad fact that the one thing in the world that I would love to have right now is a banana. Yes, you read right, a banana.
I haven’t eaten a banana since the end of March this year, when Tropical Cyclone Larry devastated Northern Queensland and wiped out most of the banana crop. According to the Australian Banana Growers’ Council, 90%, $300 million worth, of our commercial banana crop was destroyed.
As a result, banana prices have been amazingly high – I’ve noted bananas for $12 a kilo for the last few weeks, and colleague JW who was musing with me yesterday said she’s seen them as high as $16! Neither of us has been prepared to pay $2 or $3 dollars for a single banana, but I think I might crack soon. Banana chips and banana yogurt aren’t doing it for me. Things are meant to go back to normal by December; they’re definitely not normal at the moment, not when you have two grown women dreaming out loud about the bananas they haven’t eaten for the last four months. Can I wait that long?
Picture by Bryn Donaldson
Categories: bananas, navel-gazing
12 Comments
I never stopped buying them, I just massaged my budget around a little. $9-$10 extra a week that I can’t spend on anything else. All for the sake of fibre and regularity. 😀
My wife forked out 1$ for two tiny sad black little things the other day. She was really happy with the find, overjoyed of finding bananas to that amazingly low price, and they weren’t so black they couldn’t be eaten, or at worst be put into muffins!
I just blinked. Bananas indeed.
That’s like $40 a month just for bananas, Mooiness! I admire your sense of priorities. I think I’m going to succumb and buy myself a banana this weekend… Mmmmmmm… bananas… [Homer Simpson drool]
So who got to eat the two precious morsels, Alex? Your children? 🙂
Hi CW,
Oh I miss Bananas I do,
They’ve pushed up the interest rates too!
Those little yellow morsels, oft baked in cake,
I appreciate,them now, much too late.
TB
(apples – blah!)
Some people are joking about how they can either buy bananas that week, or petrol 🙂
Hey TB-), more rhyming comments, please 🙂 You know, I haven’t seen much banana cake around lately. Lots of carrot cake, but no banana…
Toxic Purity it’s a bit like that, innit? I resent the price of petrol because it makes me say things like “Remember [in quavering voice] when we could fill the tank for $20, M dear?”
I guess I am the lucky one as a patron of mine often brings us heaps of bananas from his garden!!! Good huh. ;p
Very good, Hoi! Never mind, I will buy a banana on the weekend…
Spookily, when I read this, I was eating a banana. We seem to be able to get them quite cheaply here in NZ, which seems weird – you’d think if we can get them cheap, so can you (or we could export them to you, and make $$ 😉 ).
Simon, where do bananas grow in NZ?
I bought a banana yesterday ($11.99 a kilo) – haven’t eaten it yet though…
Um, nowhere apparently….oops.
Turns out we get them from the Phillipines or Ecuador. Still seems weird that we’d be able to import them for cheaper than you could, though…
We probably don’t import them because of quarantine. If we did they’d be sprayed with so many poisons I wouldn’t want to eat them…