One fine evening I was standing in our back yard talking with our neighbor, John, when our conversation turned to fruit trees. It made me think of a question that had been nagging me since we first arrived here in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

I noticed a strange practice right away, on the first day we were here. People here wrap up their stalks of green bananas while they're still growing on the tree. You see it everywhere, a banana tree with a stalk of bananas all wrapped up in plastic, or burlap sacks, or some other type of material. It looks a bit strange, particularly since some of the banana trees are twelve to fifteen feet tall. Wrapping all the stalks up must be a bit of a chore.

Banana trees grow profusely in this area and there are many different varieties. There are sweet bananas, cooking bananas, fat bananas, skinny bananas, long and short bananas.

So here was my chance and I asked John why everyone wrapped up their bananas. He told me there are several reasons for "wrapping bananas." First and foremost it is to keep the large fruit bats from eating and ruining them. John said he once lost a nice bunch of bananas to fruit bats before he learned about wrapping them. Also, people here think that wrapping the bananas makes them grow bigger and ripen faster. He himself had posed the same question to a native friend of his. His friend had explained the reasons for wrapping up the bananas.

Then this friend also explained why "white people" have such large feet: because they always wear socks and shoes and thus their feet are all "wrapped up."

I don't know whether wearing socks and shoes causes feet to grow larger, but it can certainly contribute to them getting more ripe. I had a friend whose feet got so ripe... but that's another story.