I found these Russian banana potatoes a few months ago at the Happy Boy Farms stand at the Noe Valley farmers' market and decided to take them home to test the resemblance in my fruit basket. (Happy Boy is the coolest stand around, as confirmed by their cartoon vegetable signs. They compete for my affection with Tomatero Organic Growers, even though they don't even know I exist. sigh.)
This is a case in which the vegetables themselves are pretty normal, but it's the humans who've gone a bit loopy. I'm talking about naming practices that bring us into the territory of surrealism. When things are named after other things, independent identities begin to dissolve, and it gets especially confusing when 1) the things don't exactly resemble each other and 2) you try to figure out which is meant to be the original and which the copy and why.
So does the wiener dog look like a hot dog or does the hot dog look like a dog dog? And then there's this banana potato that is also a type of fingerling potato, as in little finger. To recap: a potato that looks like a banana that looks like a finger. Whose finger, you ask? Well, that depends. If you're talking potatoes, I'm assuming it's a human finger. When you get into banana territory , those tiny sweet bananas are known as lady fingers, but there is also a more elongated kind called monkey fingers, and yet another kind named goldfinger. So could I say that someone has banana fingers or potato fingers or banana potato fingers? And are lady finger bananas supposed to look like the genteel fingers of ladies (though I find them a little too stubby to be genteel—the bananas, that is) or the delightful cookies known as lady fingers? Are fingers supposed to look tasty?
Of course, these potatoes could also be the punchline to some farmer's joke about what you get when you try to breed tropical fruit in Eastern Europe...
I can think of at least two other vegetables named after fruit (lemon cucumber, watermelon radish) but no fruit named after vegetables. I'm still thinking, but perhaps it's a sign that people are more familiar with fruit and are reassured when strange vegetables can be associated with a known piece of produce. Why are there no radish apples? Or rutabaga oranges? On the matter of linking produce to body parts, it does make the plant parts more recognizable, but I'm not sure how reassuring that naming practice is (i.e. the aforementioned "fingers," also blood oranges). Okay, I'll stop before we all go bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s.
