Bananas are large part of the economy and a foundation in Jamaican cuisine. They are credited to being discovered by Jamaican Jean Francois Poujot in 1836. The Jamaican tradition of growing bananas has a strong presence in Jamaican history. Today the Jamaican banana industry is suffering partly due to lack of technology and strong government limitations for exportation. Jamaican banana bread is a tasty treat that has been passed down from generation to generation.
             There are a wide variety of historic references to bananas. Bananas are mentioned in ancient Chinese, Hindu, Greek and Roman texts. The earliest written reference to banana is in Sankrist and dates back to around 500 BC. It is believed by some horticulturists that bananas were the first fruit in the earth. The origin of bananas is placed in Southeast Asia, in the jungles of Malaysia, Indonesia or Philippines, where so many varieties of wild bananas still grow today.
             Bananas have later traveled with human population. The first Europeans to know about bananas were the armies of Alexander the Great, while they were campaigning in India in 327 BC. , The banana was thought to be the forbidden fruit of paradise by both Moslems and Christians in the Middle Ages. Arabs brought them to Africa. Africans are credited to have given the present name, since the word banana would be derived from the Arab finger. The Portuguese brought them to the Canary Islands. The bananas changed during all these trips. It gradually lost its seeds, filled out with flesh and diversified. When Spaniards and Portuguese explorers went to the New World, the banana traveled with them. These historical bananas were not the sweet yellow banana we know today, but the red and green variety. They are usually referred to as plantains to distinguish them from the sweet fruit lightly textured fruit we know today.
             The yellow sweet banana is a mutant strain of the cooking banana, discovered in 1836 by Jamaican ...