Don't Laugh: Banana Peels Are A Real Hazard

Also a dandy income stream for the felonious.

From Gastro Obscura:
When New Yorkers Were Menaced by Banana Peels
They slipped and fell. Really!

In 1907, Anna H. Sturla boarded a ferry, slipped on a banana peel, and demanded $250 in compensation from the boat’s operators. Three doctors had examined her, she claimed, and told her she needed an operation. She received $150—a significant sum at the time, although less than the $500 she received after her first banana-peel incident, a fall on the train-station steps at 125th Street and Park Avenue.

“Not six months went by after that,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “before Mrs. Sturla was once more in trouble with these arch-foes of hers, banana peels.” In total, Anna Sturla received $2,950 from 17 accidents in four years. In 11 cases, Sturla blamed banana peels. When the Times wrote about her, Sturla was on trial for making fraudulent complaints.

But for years, she was taken seriously. After all, many New Yorkers suffered similar injuries. Slipping on a banana peel is a cliché, a vintage vaudeville gag. But its origins weren’t just slapstick comedy. Before it became a comedy trope, banana peels menaced New Yorkers for decades.

When bananas first arrived in New York City, it was a triumph of logistics and planning. After the Civil War, writes Dan Koeppel in Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, bananas in the U.S. were like caviar: expensive and hard-to-find status symbols. After all, sailing the tropical fruit from the nearest banana-producing area, Jamaica, could take three weeks by schooner, which was longer than the banana’s shelf life. But once an entrepreneur realized that leaving bananas on-deck kept them cool and unspoiled, it sparked a banana bonanza. Soon, networks of factories were providing ice to cool bananas in transit, and the fruit became a ubiquitous and cheap snack stateside.

But it came at a cost. Vendors touted banana skins as “sanitary wrappers” and sold them as a street food. Sure enough, New Yorkers discarded the wrappers onto the street, and the pages of turn-of-the-century New York City newspapers contained accounts of shockingly serious banana-related injuries....

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