COLUMN: Monkey see, Monkey don't

Image by Jared Kelly via Flickr

By Tobin Barnes
And here I thought I knew how to open up a banana.

Nope. Didn’t.

Turns out monkeys do it better.

Open a banana, that is.

Yeah, all this time I’ve been strangling them. For 57 years, going on 58.
Monkey see, monkey do. But I didn’t.

Huh.

Makes me wonder what else I’ve been botching up along the way. Makes me think there might be a better way of doing just about anything—tricks of the trade of life and such. Just didn’t know them.

Nobody’s told me or I haven’t figured them out for myself. Maybe I’ve been living in deprived ignorance, in a fool’s paradise, when things could have been so much better.

Of course, you’ve probably been in the same banana boat as me. After all, I’ve never seen any human doing it better than I’ve been doing it.

Like me, you’ve always taken a banana by that so-called stem, that little handy-dandy, pop-top handle thingy there, thinking that’s what it was made for, and then you’ve tried to break it off.

Sometimes it broke off pretty well—if you were lucky (I don’t even know if ripeness has anything to do with it), but sometimes it was like rubber, and you ended up mooshing up the top part of the fruit inside, trying to open that thing up. It turned into a mess sometimes. You had to bite it or pry it or bang it to get it to open.

Even when the stem broke off correctly, usually only one segment of the peel stripped down. You had to go back up to two or three more times to bring down the other sides.

Turns out that method was totally inefficient.

Monkeys would have laughed at you, if there had been any monkeys around.

In my case, I thankfully have had no monkeys around when I’ve opened a banana, castigating me with monkey laughter from behind my back.

On the other hand, if I had had a monkey or two in my life, I would have seen them peeling bananas the right way. (However, there’s no guarantee that I, like the average baby monkey, would have adapted.)

To learn how to peel a banana properly, I had to stumble upon a YouTube video. That’s right. It took cutting-edge technology to teach me something simple.

So what does that say about me? Or you? Or, more abstractly, the Universe?

Anyway, this guy gets on the video there with a bunch of bananas—can’t even see his face—and he says, like you, he’s always peeled a banana the wrong way; that is, until this girl taught him how to do it like a monkey. You see, monkeys want to get to the fruit right away, not mess around with it like a human.

So instead of breaking off the stem, monkeys pinch the bottom end of the banana, and, “Voila!,” as a French monkey would say, the peel breaks into two halves that can be quickly taken apart. And immediately the monkeys have their fruit, “Tout de suite.”

No fuss, no muss. No human biting, no human mooshing.

Can it be any simpler?

Well, if you need your instructions illustrated—after all, we’re not a bunch of dumb monkeys—search YouTube for “How to Open a Banana Like a Monkey.”

Oh, and one caveat: I’m thinking that if you’re dealing with a fairly green banana, you can pinch that sucker until the cows come home and it’s not going to open up. But then, even a monkey would know that.