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How to Peel a Banana Creatively

By Peter Lloyd

Which is the more creative way to peel a banana? From the top or from the bottom? Does it matter? Did you even know that some people prefer to open their bananas from the far end, the end opposite the stem? Neither did I till I ran into a contrarian peeler and found a bunch of evidence and fellow bottom-up peelers backing him up.

My friend the songwriter and attorney Ben Lawson peels from the far end. When I saw him do it the first time, I thought, “Creative guy that Ben is, he's probably just experimenting, trying a new approach. That's what makes his music so fresh and original after all.” But no, Ben explained, he always peels that way. It has its advantages, he began to tell me.

First, Ben claims that peeling from the far end removes more unappetizing fibers. The conventional method, using the stem as a handle to wrench open your banana, mushes a good part of the tip. Instead Ben gently squeezes the far end. When the tip cracks open, he carefully separates the peel at the break and draws the segments down. Or would that be up?

It's called the monkey method by some, including the folks who put together the Wikihow page that describes, step by step, several banana-peeling methods. The entry, How to Peel a Banana features the video, below, How to Peel a Banana Like a Monkey.


Banana peeling hardly represents a burning political issue, but Steven E. Landsburg takes it seriously enough to write a tongue-in-cheek analysis in the Everyday Economics section of Slate, The Great Banana Revolution: Should you peel bananas from the bottom up?

I'm more concerned about my knee-jerk, why-do-you-do-it-that-way? reaction to Ben's approach. But it's typical, isn't it? Though we humans bore easily and demand novelty from our entertainment, for example, we reject novelty when it challenges our habits. All manner of studies, including work described in Why Great Ideas Get Rejected by David Burkus, demonstrate that we are more inclined to reject novelty when faced with uncertainty.

No matter how open-minded we think we are or try to be, we tend to reject creative ideas, that is, anything that challenges the status quo. If I had begun to read this Workout rather than write it, I'm quite sure I would have bristled at someone asking me, “Which is the more creative way to peel a banana?” As much as I'd like to think my critical thinking habits might have made me wary of an essay about banana peeling, I suspect otherwise.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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