The Banana

You would think, on first principles, that a banana peel ought to be the same shape as the thing it contains.

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Nice, clean cylinder. Logical. Consistent. The sort of tidy solution that would get approving nods in a design meeting and a small note in the margin saying “elegant”.

Instead, what you actually get is a five-sided object pretending, at a glance, to be round. A fruit that has clearly decided that geometric integrity is for other people and that it has places to be.

Except it isn’t even reliably five-sided, which rather undermines the whole notion that there’s a plan. Some come in at four, some at six, and occasionally you find one that looks like it was finished on a Friday afternoon with whatever sides were left in the box. You start out assuming there’s a standard. There isn’t. There’s a range.

At first you assume this is just botanical sloppiness. A lack of discipline. The sort of thing that would have a project manager pacing about asking why the outside doesn’t match the specification of the inside, and why the specification appears to be optional.

Then you try to imagine the alternative. A truly cylindrical banana. Perfectly smooth. No ridges, no seams, no clues. Just a polished yellow tube with all the helpful accessibility features designed out of it.

And suddenly it becomes clear that this would be a terrible idea.

You’d stand there, holding it, rotating it like a confused archaeologist. Where do you start? There’s no edge, no weak point, no hint. Just a continuous surface resisting all attempts at entry. You’d dig a thumbnail in, fail, escalate to a knife, and end up performing what feels like minor surgery on a piece of fruit.

The current banana, with its faintly pentagonal - or occasionally hexagonal if it’s feeling adventurous - peel, is quietly admitting something rather important. It is not there to satisfy your sense of symmetry. It is there to be opened without fuss.

Those ridges are not a failure. They are deliberate lines of weakness. Pre-installed access points. The equivalent of the little notch on a plastic packet that saves you from chewing through the corner like a Labrador.

Which does rather undermine the initial complaint. The peel doesn’t match the inside because matching the inside would make it worse.

It’s an inelegant solution to a practical problem, which is probably why it feels so familiar. Anyone who has ever added a slightly ugly bracket, cut a slot where a neat hole would have done, or left a panel a bit proud just so it can be removed again, will recognise the thinking.

The banana is not badly designed. It is designed by someone who has actually tried to open one.

I still check how many sides mine has before eating it. No idea why. It hasn’t changed the outcome so far.