Bananadine
Encyclopedia
Banana
Banana is the common name for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa and for the fruit they produce. Bananas come in a variety of sizes and colors when ripe, including yellow, purple, and red....
peels. A hoax recipe for its "extraction" from banana peel was originally published in the Berkeley Barb
Berkeley Barb
The Berkeley Barb was a weekly underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, from 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war and civil-rights movements as well as the...
in March 1967. It became more widely known when William Powell
William Powell (author)
William Powell is the author of The Anarchist Cookbook, which he has since disowned. He and his wife are currently the co-directors of Education Across Frontiers, an organization aimed at the professional development of international school teachers and administrators.-Employment:* CEO of the...
, believing it to be true, reproduced the method in The Anarchist Cookbook
The Anarchist Cookbook
The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and other items...
in 1970 under the name "Musa sapientum Bananadine" (referring to the banana's old binomial nomenclature
Binomial nomenclature
Binomial nomenclature is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, although they can be based on words from other languages...
). The original hoax was designed to raise questions about the ethics of making psychoactive drugs illegal and prosecuting those who took them: "what if the common banana contained psychoactive properties, how would the government react?" One book of one-liner joke comics, published in 1971, contained a comic in which a teen is secretly handing bunches of bananas to a zoo gorilla at night, uttering the line "Just throw the skins back, man!"
Researchers at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
have found that banana peel contains no intoxicating chemicals, and that smoking it produces only a placebo effect
Placebo effect
Placebo effect may refer to:* Placebo effect, the tendency of any medication or treatment, even an inert or ineffective one, to exhibit results simply because the recipient believes that it will work...
. Over the years, there has been considerable speculation regarding the psychoactive properties of banana skins.
Donovan
Donovan
Donovan Donovan Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch (born 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. Emerging from the British folk scene, he developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music...
's hit single "Mellow Yellow
Mellow Yellow
"Mellow Yellow" is a song and single release by Donovan. It reached #2 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. in 1966 and #8 in the UK in early 1967....
" was released a few months prior to the Berkeley Barb article, and in the popular culture of the era, the song was assumed to be about smoking banana peels. Shortly after the "Berkeley Barb" and the song, bananadine was featured in the New York Times.
The New York-based comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know
The Whitest Kids U' Know
The Whitest Kids U' Know is an American sketch comedy troupe and television program of the same name. The group consists of Trevor Moore, Sam Brown, Zach Cregger, Timmy Williams and Darren Trumeter, though other actors occasionally appear in their sketches. They were accepted into the HBO U.S...
, performed a parody about the bananadine hoax, titled "Smoking Banana Peels". It is the 8th sketch of the 5th episode of Season 4.
External links
- Sniggle.net Article featuring a fake Bananadine recipe