Bananas

I'm not really a big one for new year's resolutions, but this year, and not for the first time, I began with the intention of eating more bananas. I like bananas, and when I do my weekly big shop at the weekend I almost always buy a bunch, but I've often found that by the end of the week I've only eaten one or two and the rest have had to be thrown out. It's far from ideal, and I've now decided to take control of my life in this small way and eat lots of bananas.

It's been going well: to the best of my estimation, I've eaten one banana each day this year, and I don't remember having to throw any out. I think once or twice there have been small parts of the day's banana that weren't good and which I didn't eat, but that goes with the territory when it comes to bananas.

I've also been recording my journey in a Twitter thread, which mostly consists of posts with a number of banana emojis corresponding to the number of bananas I've eaten to date. I also occasionally use the thread to document obstacles I've encountered and the like. It's now day 52 and I think I've proven my commitment to the bit, so although I have no intention of stopping any time soon I thought I'd take some time to reflect.

Because It's There

An obvious first question that someone coming across my thread might ask is "Why are you doing this?" It's a fair question. A mutual called The Outsider Humanist actually did ask me this on February 4, and my response was "I felt like I wasn't living my best life". I think that's accurate: I mentioned above how I like bananas but I wasn't getting through the ones I bought and that wasn't ideal. Eating a banana every day is much closer to ideal. But although that was why I started doing it, I think that the project has gathered an increased significance for me.

It's not just about eating bananas anymore; it's about starting something and then keeping it going come rain or shine, or snow. Leaving the record of it in my Twitter thread is important to me too: there's a lot of sadness in the world and a lot of it probably gets presented to you on the timeline of your favourite microblogging site, but I hope that when people see my banana tweets they'll think "Ah good, Mike's still out there eating his bananas" and that'll give them something positive to cling to.

Human endeavour is not typically something that stands in need of external justification. People run marathons, they put people on the Moon, and I'm eating a daily banana, not to secure some instrumental good, but just as a further expression of the human spirit. Humans are not the only animal that eats bananas, and we may not even be the only animal that eats a banana every day, but we're the only animal that decides to eat a banana every day and then follows through on it for as long as fate permits, and I think this unique quality of ours is something to be celebrated.

The Thread

If you'd like to read the thread and you're willing to access Twitter, it begins here. I'll briefly recount some themes that have emerged when making the thread.

Arrangements

Partly to inject a bit of interest, and partly just to make them easier to count, I often put the banana emojis into some kind of special arrangement rather than just putting them in a long string. I first put them into a 2D rectangle on day 15. On day 19 I arranged them into the number 19, which was how I learned that they don't always display the same way when you post them as they did in the composing box, and so the 19 is a bit wonky. I tried finding a blank emoji that I could put in as a spacer, but I didn't find anything suitable so I've just been using spaces and being mindful of how it might look with different widths for the emojis and/or spaces. On day 36 I arranged them into a triangle rather than a square, to draw attention to the fact that in addition to being the sixth square number, 36 is also the eighth triangular number. On day 42 I arranged them into what was supposed to be a Babel fish. And on day 50 I arranged them into an L.

Shopping

Bananas often don't last the whole week between my big shops, especially since most of the bananas in a bunch will tend to be at around the same stage of ripeness, so I've often found myself running out of bananas midweek and having to swing by a shop to secure the supplies I need to keep my project on track. The most dramatic occasion was fairly early on, when I still wasn't sure how committed I was, and buying the bananas would mean taking a detour through the snow and ice. Near the end of last year I had quite a scary fall on some ice and so when it got icy again in January I was quite nervous walking through it, but I decided to make the effort and continue with the daily banana-eating. Forty-six days and forty-six bananas later, I'm glad I did.

It's also not so bad having a midweek banana run pencilled into the diary on occasion¹, because it means that if there's something else I need or want I don't have to decide between going without and making a special trip.

Potassium

More than one person has suggested that by eating so many bananas I might eat too much potassium. It is possible to do yourself a mischief by eating too much potassium — if you get it your doctor will apparently call your condition "hyperkalemia", which sounds to me like Greek for "too much potassium in the blood" — but I looked it up and I'm not worried about this happening to me. In the course of researching this issue I learned that, assuming I didn't miscalculate, a healthy amount of potassium to eat is about a kilo a year. (That's about 2.2 pounds, for my American readers.)

Eating a banana also exposes you to a small amount of ionizing radiation, apparently mainly due to the radioactivity of one of the isotopes of potassium. The Banana Equivalent Dose is even sometimes used as a unit of radiation, equivalent to approximately 0.1 microsieverts. My understanding is that this is not very much radiation and so I don't need to worry about this either.

Discipline

[W]hen philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, etc.) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, etc.). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip‐service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. (Williamson 2006: 182)

It's a long time since I read that paper; I haven't reread it in order to research this post, and I don't appear to have read it since I started keeping extensive albeit non-meticulous and non-comprehensive records of my reading in January 2019. But the idea in this passage that philosophy must be disciplined by something stuck with me. Of course Williamson says that you need to be disciplined by more than one of them, but why is it OK not to be disciplined by all of them?

I really don't expect this would be Williamson's answer to the question, but I think that at least some of the value of discipline is that by anchoring oneself to a project with legible constraints you give yourself a structure for valuable things to accrete around. You give yourself problems you need to work on, and reasons to do things you'd rather not do. Discipline your philosophy of language with logic, and you can't just wave away semantic paradoxes. Discipline your philosophy of time with physics and you can't just wave away the relativity of simultaneity. Discipline yourself with going to the Moon and you have to invent teflon and astronaut ice cream, or whichever of the supposed by-products of the space program wasn't an urban myth. Discipline yourself with daily banana-eating and posting about it, and you have to face your fear of the snow, go to the shops midweek and figure out which arrangements of banana emojis will display properly on the screen. Or decide to write more frequent blogposts even when you don't have anything to say, and perhaps you'll eventually find that you do.

Last week I said I wasn't intending to write them weekly, but I've changed my mind and now that's the plan. It wasn't long after finishing the last one that I started looking forward to writing this one. It feels good, like I've finally got my voice back. See you next week!

Notes

[1] Why not every week? Well, after acquiring some bananas midweek I'll sometimes have some left over when I do my big shop, which means I can buy a bunch that's still green and so will have its most delicious period at the back end of the following week.

References

• Williamson, Timothy (2006), 'Must Do Better', in Patrick Greenough, and Michael P. Lynch (eds), Truth and Realism (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010), pp.177–187, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288878.003.0010, accessed 21 Feb. 2025.