On the off chance you’ve ever been tempted to eat a banana pre-peeling (and we can’t imagine why, other than, you know, feeling lazy), a Japanese company named Setsuzo Tanaka has you covered. According to the New York Post, scientists have developed a banana called the Mongee, (pronounced ‘mon-gay’) with a surrounding skin that’s entirely edible. ‘Mongee’. by the way, is Japanese slang for ‘incredible’, which seems apt.
The science behind this revolutionary fruit involves first planting and growing banana trees in an environment that has a temperature of -76 degrees Fahrenheit.
The bananas are, at just the right moment, then thawed and replanted the bananas — the change in temperature reportedly causes the plants to grow quickly, leaving the fruit with a peel that has a ‘lettuce’-like texture, D&T Farm’s spokesman Tetsuya Tanaka explained.
Journalists at the website RocketNews 24 tried the fruit and reported some of their findings: it indeed does have very thin skin, and a strong tropical flavor similar to that of a pineapple. It’s also very sweet, with about 24.8 grams of sugar, as opposed to the average 18.3 grams in a regular banana. (The skin itself is not particularly flavorful, they added.)
If you’d like to do a taste test for yourself, however, prepare to book a flight to Japan. According to RocketNews24, Mongees are only found (at $5.75 or £4.04 each; pretty pricy for a banana) at the Fruit Corner of Tenmanya Okayama, a department store in western Japan, and they have limited supplies.
