A Banana a Day
Keeps the horse pistol away
I don’t know how many hundreds, if not thousands, of times my father said this when I was growing up; “A banana a day will keep the horse pistol away.”
I spent a part of my youth living in El Paso, Texas. My parents would cross the border every week or so to buy extraordinarily cheap bananas (and other cheap stuff) in Juarez. If any of us kids would dare to say, “I’m hungry,” our dad would immediately respond with, “Have a banana.” We were constantly well stocked on bananas and we had to eat them before they went bad. Bananas from Mexico were a cheap way to feed four growing kids with bottomless stomachs.
You might think that I would have developed an aversion to bananas but I escaped that fate. I still eat bananas today but rarely more than one or two a week. I prefer to get my potassium from avocados. In the produce department, I am that annoying person who snaps just one or two bananas off a bigger bunch.
By the way, if you have rose bushes in your garden you should throw your banana peels onto the ground around a rose bush and let them rot there. Rose bushes love that!
You can also rub the inside of a banana peel over your skin in summer to keep mosquitoes away. It works to keep other things away, too.
