No one knows banana peels better than New Yorkers!

If now to select a "perfect" fruit, taking into account its taste, nutrition, price, and convenience, you may want to think about the heart of that who it is.

I'm afraid that many people's answer will be bananas, think of citrus also don't worry, because today when the main character is the banana.

It has a warm and bright appearance, charming around ma, and sweet taste, is affordable, and most importantly, extremely convenient to eat, comes with natural and pollution-free packaging, and is even easy to tear open with the texture.

When you don't eat it clean and dry, put it in your pocket or backpack, it is a necessary fruit for home travel, and when you eat it, the outer skin is wrapped with sweet and soft flesh, which doesn't make your fingers sticky at all.

Coincidentally, the businessman who sold bananas from South America to New York also advertised the same thing, but the straightforward Americans believed the banana peel is the packaging of bananas, and in their concept, the packaging can be thrown away on the street.

So a "banana peel crisis" swept New York with the rise of bananas and emerged.

The banana is an eternal legend in the fruit world, a tropical fruit that has not only taken the world by storm but has also sold at bargain prices and even driven the development of the transportation industry.

With its home in Southeast Asia, the banana made its way across the ocean to the new world of the Americas during the Age of the Great Voyage and quickly took root, becoming an important food for the locals. Of course, some bananas that could not be eaten in time flowed into the market for sale, and some traders from North America would occasionally bring some back, but still only as a novelty fruit.

In 1876, businessman Lorenzo Dao Baker went to Venezuela in South America to search for gold and ended up bringing back only a shipload of fresh bananas. Luckily, he arrived in Philadelphia before they went bad, and he found Andrew Preston, and the two of them partnered up to open the Boston Fruit Company.

The two men did everything they could to promote bananas, and they took advantage of the banana's battered appearance by issuing a lot of postcards with celebrities holding bananas touching their lips, implying nothing that needs to be said explicitly.

Before that, the residents of the United States did not eat bananas, but because of the immaturity of transport technology as well as ripening technology, bananas are only sold in some port cities, and the price is quite high, it is difficult to impact the market of traditional fruits such as apples and peaches.

So the strategy of the two men was to make bananas a low-priced popular fruit, selling at only half of the price of apples. The strategy proved to be successful, and with the emergence of railroad transportation and cold chain technology, bananas gradually came to the common people.

The price of bananas came down, but it was not always a good thing. As the cost was pressed, the workers in banana production became the target of exploitation, and a very bad crackdown broke out, which will not be expanded here.

Anyway, New Yorkers could eat cheap bananas, unlike today's plastic packaging is so popular, in those days this kind of food with its own "packaging" is a great advantage, so bananas quickly became a casual snack in the streets.

Put it in the pocket clean, with no juice, and not afraid of the slightest bump and squeeze, with a hand, peel the outer skin can enjoy the sweetness from the tropics, and then throw the banana peel so a hand, throw out the problem.

In 1884, The Times reported that a 75-year-old wealthy merchant stepped on a banana peel outside his home, fell on a large fart pier, fractured his right leg near the hip, and became disabled in his later years.

Cases of death from banana peels are not uncommon either. The article "Banana Peel Causes Death" describes a factory worker who slipped and fell after stepping on a banana peel and was eventually mended by a passing truck, giving his life.

Again, some people suffer damage when they step on a banana peel and fall, and others profit from it. Famous as the case of Mrs. Anna H. Stella, who boarded a ferry in 1907, slipped on a banana peel on board and demanded $250 from the captain for soup and medicine, and eventually got $150.

Six months later, she did the same trick again, slipping on a banana peel on another ferry, and this time she got $200. According to statistics, she had a total of 17 banana peel accidents in the next four years and received a total of $2950 in compensation, and those who did not know thought she was stranded there at public expense to practice shoveling.

In 1910, Ms. Stella's banana peel accident was written up in detail, and the contributors thought she was suspected of malicious extortion, which became the topic of conversation after dinner in New York. For her part, she said the banana peel did appear to be stalking her.

The streets of New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had more than just banana peels, and the level of filth was comparable to that of the original food market, for no other reason than the high population density and the number of immigrants, most of whom still retained the habit of throwing away their household garbage anywhere, which might not be a problem in the countryside by natural decomposition, but there were more people and more garbage, and decomposition could not catch up with manufacturing.

How dirty was New York at that time? The height of the garbage piled up in the streets to the ankles to knees, full of fruit and rotten leaves, there will be dead animal carcasses, stinking, to solve the problem of garbage siege, the city of New York even came up with the method of putting wild boars to eat garbage such as poison against poison.

In 2012, Japanese scholar Mabuchi and his team bought back 12 kinds of Cavendish bananas from all over the world to explore how slippery banana peels are, and conducted 60 experiments.

The results show that the banana peel is slippery, the average coefficient of friction on the linoleum is 0.066 and slightly higher on the hardwood floor, the average coefficient of friction is 0.083. you may not have any concept of this data, do the non-stick pan coating of Teflon friction coefficient is 0.04, the ice friction coefficient about 0.05, and the rubber on the concrete floor sliding friction coefficient of 1.02?

Even in the peel world, banana peel is the top, probably because banana peel produces a gel-like substance when squeezed, a substance that has similarities to the fluid in our joints.

This research won the 2014 funny Nobel Prize in Physics

In addition, because the most popular variety of banana back then, Big Mike, has become extinct, the present-day variety of Cavendish can not reproduce the degree of slippery feet of New Yorkers back then, Big Mike bananas have thicker and more slippery skin, especially after throwing them on the ground for a few days to decay to a sticky state.

Although it was not a human, the banana peel thrower was a real dog

Just like today's frequent car accidents, and car accident bumper stickers, although some people are injured as a result, we still use this kind of thing to play with the terrain to dissipate the dark and sad spiritual connotation of it.

Motion picture cover

The banana peel on the streets of New York is certainly no exception. It is generally believed that the first to step on a banana peel this stunt into the works of the comedians on the vaudeville stage, and later gradually into all kinds of works.

In the era of silent movies, stepping on a banana peel and struggling to fall is the best comedy material. From the 1920s, many low-budget comedy films love to use the banana peel bridge, the status may be no less than the current stand-up comedy in the harmonic stems.

Motion picture cover

Motion picture cover

Today we can still find the figure of the banana peel in many places, such as our favorite childhood animation of the classic cat and mouse, it is often used to set traps with banana peels plot.

In the classic prop racing game Super Mario Racing series, as well as the later imitators of Run Kart, banana peels are the most classic props, as well as Andy Warhol's most famous banana, also influenced by the banana culture in New York.

Today, the banana peel has long ceased to be a street killer, but there are many more stories of bananas. Bananas that have already experienced a mass extinction have faced another crisis in recent years, and if extinction happens again, we will have to breed new varieties from the wild species again, and we can only hope that the bananas will no longer slip their feet at that time.