So a few months ago I started blowing minds and tearing down societal norms when I did the craziest thing ever. I ate a banana... without peeling it.
I know I know, I'm a mad man. But to be honest, it wasn't the first time I had tried eating the peel. A couple of years ago I ate the flesh of the banana and just sat their looking at the peel wondering how it tasted.
After tearing a tiny sliver of a piece away with my front teeth I immediately regretted my decision and spat it back out.
However, on a completely separate day I was just sitting in class looking at the banana I was holding in my hand and thought about how annoying it would be to have to either get up and throw out the peel or leave it there on my desk.
Then all of a sudden I said to myself "Wait, why don't I just eat the peel?". But I learned from my past mistake of eating it by itself, so instead I pulled of the top stem and bit down on the banana as a hole.
As you can see I embarked on this practice out of sheer practicality and laziness and it was only after that I Google'd "should you eat the banana peel?" and found that it is a source of numerous vitamins, fiber, and can raise serotonin levels by 12%.
What was even more surprising was people's reactions to me eating the banana peel. At first, only the friend that sat with me in that class was aware of my transgression. But I started talking to more people about it and realized how unappealing (pun intended) it sounded to everyone.
In all honesty, until I was about 18 years old I did not even like bananas. They were too mushy for me. But then they became a staple in my bulking diet and I began eating two or more a day. They quickly became my second favorite "fruit", but even the one person I knew who said bananas were her favorite fruit was repulsed at the idea of me (not even herself) eating the peel.
Even though eating the peel of most other fruits is not something people are appalled by, I was not surprised by people's initial reaction. However, while I was not surprised, I was perplexed by their continued insistence that what I was doing was somehow different than eating the peel of another fruit.
Even after I explained the possible benefits of eating banana peels I would still get responses like "I don't know" and "not even monkeys eat the peel" as if we aspire to be like monkeys or use them as a baseline for our own behavior or that the stereotype of monkeys eating bananas somehow makes them experts in how one should eat one. This is just highlighting my confusion, not to say that I was particularly annoyed with this response.
At a certain point I just did it for shock value. Because like any other peel it is best to rinse it off thoroughly before consuming it, and I was often too lazy to rinse off my bananas. But I posted it on my Instagram and Snapchat and at was genuinely surprised at the amount of people who took the time to respond to me. To reiterate, I was surprised, not annoyed, because people that I never talk to even made comments.
Some people even wanted to record me eating the peel to share it with other people.
I mean I must have been blowing minds. And it was borne out of laziness and practicality. To this day I still don't take it that seriously or think it is that big of a deal, and hardly ever actually eat the peel.
Mostly, what these encounters demonstrate, at least to me, is just how strong social conditioning can be, even with such an insignificant practice. The idea that "this is how it has always been and therefor it is right".
I can imagine how many people are rolling their eyes right now, but when confronted by people not just saying that what I was doing was "weird" but also trying to come up with reasons why it is "wrong" that is the conclusion that I came to. That only ever seeing people peel bananas before eating them, conditioned them to think that they should be peeled.
And hey, maybe they should be, but no one could really come up with a why because they never looked for one or was ever told one.
There are much more significant conditioning that we have received from society and those are the ones that we should reflect on, before they cause us to reject some other idea before considering it. Or maybe they have to manifest in your judgement before you can notice them, and try to peel them away.
