Bottoms Up?

The idea of peeling bananas from the bottom intrigued brother-in-law and F & S subscriber Tim. In his response to a recent Baby Bananas post, he pondered the merits of peeling a banana from the top or bottom, as Chiquita recommends you do with baby bananas. In a great article from 2002, Slate considered this very question.

It seems that monkeys are on the bottoms up team. Although, to steal a line from the Slate piece, maybe what we call the bottom is really the top. At left, you'll see that bananas grow upward from their stems. Those decorating a bar can emphasize this point with these bar stools.

As we can see in the picture at right, there is visual evidence to support that monkeys open their bananas from the bottom. Photographic proof to the contrary seems tainted by human involvement. As for celebrity monkeys, the evidence remains vague.