The straw-yellow dust is a nutritional juggernaut, rich in potassium (three times more than in the fresh plant), fiber, vitamin B6, and magnesium. In the 1980s Indian scientists even found that it cured ulcers. And yet, for over a century, scientists have tried, and mostly failed to get people to eat the dried, powdered fruit. Even body builders who routinely torture their taste buds with various concoctions won’t touch the stuff: Americans prefer their bananas fresh or not at all.

The eighteenth-century botanist Linnaeus, who helped build the foundation of modern biological nomenclature, first gave the banana its scientific name musa sapientum, or wise men. His inspiration was less botanical and more romantic; the Roman historian Pliny had written that India’s sages rested beneath the banana plant’s feathery fronds drinking in its cooling shade and eating its fruit.

It was the Arabs, upon bringing the fruit from its native soils in Southeast Asia to the Middle East and Africa, who gave us its common name: banana. The word a variation of the Arab word for finger, ‘banan’ and a nod to the bananas phalanges like appearance. A single banana is called a finger; a bunch is called a hand.

The historical impetus that moved the banana from the Middle East and then west to the Americas, is connected to the same web of colonialization and technology change that sent the chili pepper to Thailand and the potato to Ireland. “Before the 1880s, most Americans had never seen, much less eaten a banana,” writes Virginia Jenkins in Bananas: An American History. Soon after, though, things began to change.

In 1893 Ellen Swallow Richards, who had wriggled her way through MIT’s well-constructed gates under “special student status” (her specialness being that she was a woman), repeated the performance at the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair. She launched an exhibit on nutrition outside of the fair’s women’s-only ghetto, stating that ”her research was not just women’s work, but rather information for all.” Richards dubbed the event “The Rumford Kitchen,” after the Massachusetts-born physicist Benjamin Thompson, later named Count Rumford by the Holy Roman Emperor. Rumford was the first to call nutrition a science, and Richards endeavored to teach the principles of nutritional science in a manner designed for the ordinary kitchen table. To do that, she referenced the banana.

“Fruits are refreshing and valuable to give variety to the diet and to contribute water which they contain in large proportion,” wrote Richards in pamphlets that accompanied the exhibition. “Most fruits contain 85 to 90 odd per cent, of water, some sugar, and the citrates, malates, and tartrates of potassium. Other fruits, such as grapes and bananas, contain sugar in considerable proportion to 15 per cent., and their value as foods is not to be despised; bananas contain starch also.”

Faster ships and improvements in refrigeration transformed the banana from luxury to American staple, alongside the apple or the turkey, though nearly all bananas were, and still are, imported from the Caribbean. Today, an average American eats twenty-seven pounds of bananas a year. Ninety-six percent of American households buy bananas at least once a month. Their thick protective skins make for a highly portable snack, and their sugary moisture allows them to be easily folded into breads, turned into cakes and pies, and fermented into beer. We boil them for puddings, mash them for muffins, and, occasionally, stick them in a stew. And yet, we almost exclusively consume bananas fresh, causing a staggering amount of waste—a fact that we’ve known for generations.

As early as 1907, for example, food scientists optimistically tried to get us to eat preserved bananas, preferably dried to reduce both transport costs and waste. “A machine for drying bananas has a great commercial future before it,” wrote S. E. Worrell in his paper, “Recent Improvements in Machinery for Drying Different Products.” But that future never arrived. In 1950 C. M. Cornish, an undergraduate at MIT, wrote his thesis on identifying the preferred mechanisms for drying bananas, noting that “annually many tons of bananas are lost because of their great perishability.” And in 2009 the World Wildlife Fund reported that the banana industry produces more waste than any other agricultural sector in the developing world. For every ton of bananas produced, it produces two tons of waste.

Attempts to push nonperishable forms into the marketplace have so far been unsuccessful. As Guylene Aurore wrote in Trends in Food Science & Technology, “There is no real industrial banana flour or starch based production, even for animal feed.” Thirty-six percent of apples, in contrast, are turned into processed products.

Harry Willard Von Loescke, in a book titled Bananas: Chemistry, Physiology, Technology, noted the reason for the discrepancy, “In processing, bananas lose much of their flavor and the American public has not readily accepted these different products (banana flakes, powder, flour, figs, jam, or pastes).” Bananas, like wine, get much of their taste from esters, volatile organic compounds that don’t withstand processing well. Apples and other fruits contain esters, but they also contain higher levels of other compounds enabling them to hold onto more of their taste.

Yet, scientists haven’t given up. “There is a tremendous scope for enhancing its processing,” wrote Indian researcher Prashant P. Bornare earlier this year.