An Australian success story and green banana flour

I chair a small sub-committee for my film society and we meet just a few times a year. Today was the day. Meeting over, we have a bread and cheese kind of lunch - in the garden today as it was such a lovely day. And in the course of the entertaining conversation it transpired that one of my guests tried to be a bit gluten free every now and then, (not today) and she had recently discovered green banana flour as the best thing she had found so far for baking.

Now I had never heard of green banana flour and my mind, I confess, immediately went into anti health freaks, expensive exploiter mode. And, having investigated there are still aspects of this that I find a bit annoying - mainly the price. This 1 kg bag of flour for example costs around $12.00 which is several times more than ordinary flour.

However, along the way I did find a few interesting and encouraging things.

Although the blurb I read on the Natural Evolution website (more about them in a moment) implied that they had virtually invented green banana flour, it is, in fact an old thing, having been used in Africa and Jamaica as a cheaper form of flour than wheat flour. Basically you peel the green bananas (difficult), dry the flesh and grind it up. The resulting flour is gluten free and has resistant starch. What is resistant starch you may ask? According to research quoted by Wikipedia:

"Resistant starch refers to starch that resists digestion - it is not broken down in the small intestine, but reaches the large intestine, where it functions as a fermentable dietary fiber"

Whatever that means really. But I'm sure it's a good thing. I guess that's all we need to know.

Again according to Wikipedia banana flour does not taste too much of bananas - as my friend confirmed.

"Banana flour, due to the use of green bananas, has a very mild banana flavour raw, and when cooked, it has an earthy, non banana flavour; it also has a texture reminiscent of lighter wheat flours and requires about 25% less volume, making it a good replacement for white and white whole-wheat flour." Wikipedia

green banana flour brown

green banana flour white

The other major advantage of green banana flour is its role in reducing wastage. Many banana producers have to just throw out bananas because they are not the right shape for the supermarkets. Tons and tons are wasted like this every year. And the supermarkets also throw out bananas - but these are more likely to be overripe ones. And interestingly Chile is developing a flour made from overripe bananas. So it seems - all hail bananas.

And all hail to Natural Evolution who seem to be a major player in the green banana flour world. Green banana products in general actually. They also have a green banana ointment which is supposedly miraculous. But I'm not looking at that here.

Robert Watkins (and his wife Krista) is the man at the head of Natural Evolution. He is a Queensland banana farmer with an inventive mind. His first achievement was to work out a better way of transporting his lady finger bananas - now an industry standard and which won him the ABC Inventors Award. Then one day his truck ran over some green bananas. and he noticed that what remained was a kind of powder. Which gave him the idea of flour. He made a small batch painfully peeling all those green bananas by hand and sold it at the farm door. It immediately became popular, so seeing he was onto a good thing he set about inventing a machine to peel the bananas. He now has a factory - not quite open, and is selling his products around the country. Not so far into the supermarkets, but to the countless health food stores. Woolworths has Macro green banana flour. ($6.00 for 300g so $20.00 a kilo!) Now Macro is a Woolworths brand, so I suspect that ultimately the green banana flour comes from Natural Evolution. I must say I thought my friend said she got it from the supermarket, so she might have been referring to the Macro product. Natural Evolution have a user friendly map of where you can buy their branded product and they don't mention supermarkets. It seems to me though that it's only a matter of time.

As I say it's all good stuff. The wonders of human inventiveness, the turning of waste into something of value, and the health-giving properties of an alternative to all of those other gluten free flours, which did not impress my friend or Robert Watkins either who has mild gluten problems himself. As I say though its only downside is that it's yet another example of healthy stuff for the rich and out of the price range of the poor. Mind you they could do like the poor of Africa and Jamaica and peel their own green bananas, dry and grind to a powder. A food processor would do the job. Not really. It's the really poor of the world who do that sort of thing.