Among fruits used in large quantities, the bananas, takes a great place. This is a very wonderful plant, and its uses are legion.

It is very prolific, an amazement to all who know and study it. Just this one fact about bananas is astounding.

Four thousand pounds of bananas will grow within the same space of ground that is required to raise ninety-nine pounds of potatoes, or thirty-three pounds of wheat -- while the potato and the wheat require constant attention -- the banana asks for no human care beyond the removal of the old stalks as they wither.

The fruit is, of course, nourishing, whether eaten fresh or fried in the sun. When ground up, the dried fruit makes an excellent flower, and a beverage is also made from the banana.

The leaves, of course, were used in thatching of houses, and the fiber of the stalks was (and still is) woven into a canvas, used for clothing, and sacking, and rope, in third world countries. These are only a few of the hundred of sues to which the banana plant is put. No wonder it has been called the "maid of all work in the vegetable world."

The banana needs a warm temperature with a good supply of moisture, and the plant will then grow to a height of thirty feet, with leaves ten feet long. However, in plantations that is not allowed. This is because reaching such a height would pose problems in harvesting of the bunches.

All the cultivation it needs is to reap the fruit and cut down and clear aways the stalk, so that a new shoot may have room to grow up from the rootstock which lives on. The stalk dies immediately after fruiting. Bananas are gathered while still green and gradually ripen on the stalk. The ones you get from the grocery store, however, are mostly ripened in airtight hermetical rooms of ethylene gas.

It may surprise some people to know that not very long ago, this tropical fruit was a luxury hardly known outside of Eastern and Southern seaports, but quickly became so common and cheap that it is one of the United States "most consumed" fruits.

It was also not that long ago that bananas came to us by the shipload from Cuba, and other West Indies. However, our main source was and still is mainly from Central America, especially southern Mexico (Yucatan), Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

It would also shock many Americans to be told that many of those farmers in the above named countries are Amish and Mennonite.

The banana plant, though looking so much like a tree, is really only an herb, and the stems that look so substantial are formed merely of the sheathing bases of the leaf-stalks and are quite destitute of woody matter.

When full grown, the stem is surmounted by a crown of leaves and has a palm-like appearance.

A single huge bud springs from the center of the crown of leaves and then turns down and blossoms. This develops into the bunch of bananas which may weigh from fifty to one hundred pounds or more.

The plantain, a large variety of banana, has less flavor and is cooked in the tropics as a vegetable, not a fruit. Some kinds of plantain in East Africa grow to the size of a man's arm.

Millions of people in the tropics practically live on the banana, which is one of the most wonderful of natural foods.

There are two members of the banana family that yield no edible fruit, but from the leaves of one of these we obtain a valuable fiber known in the past as Manila hemp.