Why doesn't everybody eat bananas this way?

A couple of weeks ago, my husband, who doesn't even eat bananas in the rough, pointed out that, for those of us who do, it made more sense to peel them from the blossom end -- the one with the puckery rough brown spot on it -- rather than the stem. I often ignore his engineering-based observations since they have very little practical application to actual human behavior, but he claimed that monkeys do it this way. So I struggled hard to overcome years of ingrained banana-peeling habit and tried it his -- and the so-called lower primates' -- way.

Dang, my husband was right. Stop the presses.

For one thing, the stem provides a convenient handle, an elegant marriage of form and, once you look at it, function. (See Figure 1) In addition, the blossom-down method avoids the annoying banging against wrist and forearm of the hard, fibrous stem as it swings freely at the bottom of its section of peel. Aesthetically, it's far more pleasing, since you end up with three or four balanced and relatively symmetrical peel segments.

My life will never be the same.