Before 1880 most Americans had never seen a banana. By 1910 bananas were so common that streets were littered with their peels. Today Americans eat on average nearly seventy-five per year. More than a staple of the American diet, bananas also have gained a secure place in the nation's culture and folklore. They have been recommended as the secret to longevity, the perfect food for infants, and the cure for warts, headaches, and stage fright. Essential to the cereal bowl and the pratfall, they remain a mainstay of jokes, songs, and wordplay even after a century of rapid change. In this wide-ranging history of the most popular and least expensive fruit in the United States, Virginia Scott Jenkins shows how developments in international trade and transportation enabled banana shipments from the Caribbean to reach even the most remote North American towns. She describes how public health campaigns and marketing innovations enticed Americans to eat more and more of the fruit that came in its own "germ-free" packaging. She uses bananas to illustrate changes in diet and etiquette, shows how bananas symbolized the supposed danger or romance of the tropics, and visits the International Banana Festival in Fulton, Kentucky, which in its heyday touted banana consumption as a weapon against Communism — and featured a one-ton banana pudding. Covering every aspect of the banana in American culture, from its beginnings as luxury food to its reputation in the 1910s as the "poor man's" fruit to its role today as a healthy, easy-to-carry snack, Bananas provides an insightful look at a fruit with appeal.