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Welcome to It's Bananas, the podcast where we build an appetite for juicy living with your host, Becky Onnesta. She explores how tasting new and diverse fruits can lead to self discovery, joy and connection. But the thing is...you don't have to love fruit in order to enjoy all the juicy details. The whole idea is to figure out what you love for yourself.
Every episode, she spills all the details of what's on her mind and what's on her table connecting the dots between fruit and the human experience. She'll peel back the layers around how tasting fruit unexpectedly led her to herself, to finding joy and to the biggest holy grail of them all -- connection. It's deep, it's delicious, and It's Bananas!
Get ready to peel back the layers of fruity goodness with It's Bananas, the podcast where we build an appetite for juicy living and pleasure, fun, joy, and connection await with each succulent bite. It's deep, it's delicious, and it's bananas.
Hi everyone, welcome back to Snack Time here on It's Bananas. This is Becky, also known as the fruit maven. Typically we look at what's on my mind and what's on my table, but honestly, we are in the last week of the year and I have nothing fresh on my table.
The quality of food in my kitchen right now is low. Let's go with low. It is not great. I have various leftovers, which were good, but not fresh fruit, along with plenty of things that are based on sugar, but very few of them fruit based.
So there is, well, okay, there is one big exception, and I want to give a shout out to my kid for this. My best Christmas present this year, by far, was a box of freeze -dried tropical fruit that she got me.
So I have bags and bags, I mean it's like 20 different bags of dried cool fruit, dried longans, dried lychees, dried mangosteens, jackfruit. So I'm excited to dive into that over the coming days, but for today we're going to largely talk about what is on my mind.
I thought, as my final episode of 2023, that I would cover 23 Things I Learned From Fruit in 2023. Now to be fair, some of these are things I learned from fruit and some are things I learned as part of executing this podcast, and some are things that I learned brand new, and some are things that I was simply reminded of, and became more prominent over the last six months of recording its bananas episodes.
So let's get started. Number one, these are not, okay wait, these are not in priority order at all, they are just in the order that I thought of them, but number one was the absolute first thing that came to mind that I learned.
Fig pollination is one of the wackiest processes I've ever heard of in my life. In the episode where I cover this, I explain how it includes a ton of tropes that extendens unexpected pregnancies, self -sacrificing for love, all of that and still in covering that I somehow missed the fact that half of the figs story is also incest.
A listener actually had to point that out to me. That is just the wildest process. I had no idea before I dug into that. That was pretty fun, one of the number one things I've learned for sure. Number two, despite the figs wackiness, I absolutely love it as a metaphor that every person has so much going on within them that we do not often see, including myself, and I have to remember this for myself too.
I think in 2024 I might want to get a piece of fig art, or maybe I'll create a piece of fig art to hang where I'll see it somewhere just to remind me of that. So expanding more broadly, number three of the 23 things I learned from fruit in 2023.
Fruit as a metaphor is such a cool and fun form of advertising that I can aim at myself. And I go more into this in the fig episode, but just it was this really cool discovery for me that in a world where I'm inundated with advertising or news or just messages that are always in my best interest, that I can actually assign value or assign a job to the things around me to help remind myself of what I want to be reminded of.
That was really cool to me. So number four, my relationship to fruit is just like any relationship in my life. It can be whatever I want it to be. I started out talking about fruit as the gateway for how I kind of figured out what I love and what I enjoy in this world, and then it became kind of so much more as I started to dig into it over the last six months.
And fruit of course can be things like nutritional support or physical nourishment, but it can also be this beautiful metaphorical or like mental or spiritual nourishment or support. And I just I don't know, I love that.
Number five, if I treat fruit as if it's just a thing that I eat, then it's just a thing that I eat. But if I treat it as if it's an actual ally in my life, then it is. Unless, of course, it's an enemy.
Number six, watermelon. Still my least favorite fruit ever, unless I'm using it to throw it at something or someone. Hopefully I'm not throwing fruit at anyone, but look, we're all just humans here. So that leads me to number seven.
I am allowed to dislike what I dislike. We are allowed to be completely different and love what we love and not love what we do not love. Number eight, joy isn't a guarantee. Happiness can't be guaranteed.
Liking things also not guaranteed, even if we really are open and want to. Number nine, liking something or enjoying it, experiencing joy and delight is just a possible outcome at any given time. That was a big shift or a ha moment for me, because it seems, and I like it because it seems to take some of the pressure off of controlling things and just lets me interact with life as it is.
However, number 10, the main thing I can do that I can control is to set myself up for joy and delight as much as possible. Number 11 of things I learned. This takes intention and effort. Sometimes joy just lands on us out of nowhere, but mostly we have to be an active participant in creating the opportunity for joy, delight, and enjoyment to show up for us.
Number 12, planners can help. After my episode with Alison on planners, I ordered a few new ones and I have a whole new kind of plan for 2024 and how I'm gonna approach that. But for December, I've been drifting a bit without my planners because I ordered them at the end of November.
I don't know how I missed that. This month of December has just felt untethered. I have like a blank book, but it's not structured at all. I don't even use planners really as my to -do list or as my schedule, but somehow in the kooky way that I do them, they make me feel very grounded and tethered.
So I am excited to get to the beginning of the year because I need my planners back. Number 13, rest helps. I have just been reminded a number of times how important this is for me. And actually, this is probably in the middle of the list.
This is a good place for me to announce that this will be the season finale of It's Bananas season one. We are at the end of 2023 and there've been 14 episodes, I think maybe 15 if you count the little trailer, but 14 episodes, which is about the length of a Korean drama.
So it feels like a good place to wrap up this season. And I will be taking January off of It's Bananas at least to hibernate and consider what season two of It's Bananas may look like. And whether that's different than season one or if it should be renewed for season two or not, et cetera.
So I will be resting and re -imagining things. Number 14, I literally learned how to compost, which I have wanted to know how to do for a very long time. And I now also understand the difference between the role that I can play and the role that actually community services have to play.
And that's been great for me. Number 15, I figuratively internalized the value of composting the stuff that happens in our lives. It's kind of like taking that phrase, everything happens for a reason, which I personally don't happen to love, and making it more meaningful for me at least.
Like not everything in our life is good or even needs to be good. Some things need to be set aside or almost thrown away, like in a compost bin, and then mixed with time and intention to turn into a resource down the road.
Number 16, licking fruit does not objectively add much to the experience of eating fruit. It just does not. I don't really need to do it. It's not like I discovered a new way to eat fruit by licking it.
However, number 17, licking fruit does add an immense amount of adventure and playfulness to the experience that's kind of disproportionately large reward for the amount of effort. Like I lick it and I am like delight times 10 most of the time.
And even when I have found it very a yucky experience, it's just been kind of a cool thing to try. So it makes me wonder where else a small absurd behavior could be added to my life and what might happen.
I'm gonna be thinking about that for next year, but such as number 18. If I want to laugh more, I should just lick more things. It's certainly not the only way to laugh more, but I feel like it's a solid approach.
I don't know what I might start licking. I'm just saying inanimate objects, we shall see. On the flip side, if I want to laugh less, I should eat unripe fruit. Number 19, you truly have to wait so long for a haitchia persimmon to ripen.
My God, after that persimmon episode came out a couple weeks ago, I ate another one that was soft, but not quite, apparently, not quite soft enough. It has to get as soft as a water balloon that is about to burst.
It was not that. It was just like kind of soft. It felt like my mouth was trying to single -handedly turn my entire body inside out. A stringency is a real thing and it is not playing games. It is here to win, I am telling you.
Learning number 19, you have to wait for a haitchia persimmon to ripen. Number 20, this one feels like it really should be something I learned about patients on the flip side, but honestly, I learned nothing.
If you are too patient with an avocado, it's gonna go bad. You have like five minutes to eat that thing when it is ripe or it is going bad. That is just the rules. So I don't know, maybe patience is not for me.
Maybe number 20 is make luck, your friend. Like hitting it exactly right. I'm not saying I know how to do that or that I actually learned. That, you know what, maybe number 20 of the 23 things I learned from fruit this year is that not everything has to be a life lesson.
Sometimes you just get lucky and fruit tastes very, very good. And sometimes, number 21, life isn't always or even often that easy to digest. There were a number of tough things that happened for me on a personal level over the first season of this podcast, some of which I talked about and some of which I didn't.
And of course, there are ongoing big things in the world, global wars, national politics, complicated stuff at our workplaces, neighbors who are neighboring, family, friends. Things can just be difficult to take in at times and process.
And I really love having a community around me to help. And that's something I have to actively invest in consistently, which leads me to number 22. I love grapes. Grapes as a reminder of community is probably my favorite metaphor.
It's right up there along with figs, probably my favorite metaphor of the season. And also just literally, I forgot how much I like them. I've probably tried 10, maybe more different grape varieties this year.
It seemed like there were so many out. I don't know if I just hadn't noticed in the past, but there were tons and it was just an endless delight for me, which brings me to number 23 on our list of 23 things I learned about fruit in 2023.
I really love sharing fruit. I loved stretching a bit and having a number of generous guests on the podcast. So as part of the season finale of 2023, I'm announcing a fruit box giveaway. I will put it up on my Instagram today when this comes out along with the release of this episode.
All you have to do is put any kind of nice comment on that post and you're entered. You don't have to even follow me on Instagram. Just look for me Instagram at fruitmaven. You don't have to tag a friend.
You don't have to do any of the normal things you have to do. All you have to do is just tell me, just comment on the post that you wanna be in and you're in. Although you certainly can tag people if they want to join as well.
I will leave the contest open until midnight December 31st, Pacific time. And then I will contact the winner via direct message on Instagram to let them know and get the address and get all that stuff.
It's only open to send a box of fruit to a US address. So if you are outside of the US, you can still definitely participate, but you'll have to send it to someone you know in the US. The fruit will be coming from a company called Frog Hollow Farms, which is a family farm that I have enjoyed and loved in the past.
They are not sponsoring this episode, but I think their fruit is truly great. So I wanted to send out a box to a listener. So this was just a short quick episode today to wrap up the first season of It's Bananas.
I would love to hear from you as always and hear anything that you learned this season, either about fruit, from fruit, from this podcast, or even just in general in your life. And before I go, I want to leave you with a kind of quirky poem or it's a type of absurd blessing that I originally wrote the first week of January in 2021.
And I updated it for today and I titled it:
Bananas
I want to write a story that ends mid -sentence. No wrap -up, no happy ending, no redemption, honesty. Nothing makes a lick of sense, and that's fine by me.
Today, an unknown number called and a woman named Mims introduced herself and asked if I am as concerned as she is about the direction this world is going.
I glanced at the time and saw that it was one, two, three, four. 12:34
Neat.
My word of the year is two words: pizza cake. There's a story I can't be bothered to tell about how my daughter and I use it as a code word to remember
kindness
patience
imagination
and freakish delight.
She hates pizza. I hate cake.
I have a six -foot wooden cutout of the phrase, that's absurd, hanging on my wall in the living room.
My mom once sent me sixteen packets of honey, twelve small packets of ketchup, and a half -eaten column of stale saltines with the top loosely twisted closed.
She was cleaning out her pantry and thought I might enjoy a care package.
I think blush pink might be my favorite color.
Basic.
Essential.
I heard a story that a friend got a thumbs down, instead of the middle finger after she cut someone off on the freeway, and now I can't stop thinking about how delightful it is to give the world an appropriate fucking thumbs down here and there.
We're all just so damn hilariously disappointing.
Humans.
It's the last hour of a Tuesday and nothing matters all that much except my beloved Korean dramas. I want to live forever inside the gaze of bittersweet longing.
It's all so very important.
It seems like the word tits should come up in my vocabulary more.
Why do I keep joining almost cults?
I love you.
Thank you for witnessing my heart. It's bananas.
May 2024 be whimsical, absurd, ridiculously kind to your hunger, tenderly generous with your pain.
May we laugh at the puzzle of it all.
I apple you.