Yesterday I spent a few minutes in Curly-Locks's kindergarten classroom. On the shelf above the kitchen area, used for preparing snacks, I saw a row of yellow bananas, ripening. And boy, was I happy to see this! Today when he has his snack, he'll enjoy a good banana.
Years ago when we lived on the farm, we went to visit our neighbour who was also farming bio-dynamically. She had a visitor from overseas, actually a Christian Community priest who used to come to South Africa from time to time. Evelyn Capel was spiritually gifted and also much valued for the advice she could give to parents because she was able to see into the children's previous lives.
Anyhow, I digress. What I meant to share with you is a picture I still hold vividly in my memory. When we all gathered for a meal under the vine-shaded pergola, she spotted the fruit bowl on the table.
"Oh how wonderful," she exclaimed. "One of the things I was determined to do on this trip, was to eat a naturally-ripened banana."
Of course, that's not going to happen here, in the north-eastern area of North America, but we can at least avoid eating green bananas, and especially, avoid giving them to our small children. They are extremely indigestible.
If you think about it, the whole ripening process is a very special one. We cook our food to take the ripening a stage further, which all helps the digestive process. The thing is, magical cosmic processes take place within us when we taste, swallow and digest our food. These days, it seems to me, we mostly live with one extreme or the other. Either we don't care whether we eat healthily, organically and so on, or we do care, but actually treat our bodies the way commercial agriculture treats the land. i.e. this mineral is missing, so we'll add it. We're low on this vitamin, so we'll add that. And yes, I totally confess to being part of the latter camp. And this means I'm actually taking a pretty materialistic view of nutrition.
'Tis a puzzlement, though.
As I've mentioned before, small children are likely to respond to texture even more than taste. So, when it comes to bananas, give them time to ripen and mash them well if you're feeding some to your baby.
