Re: How many sides can a banana peel have (is it 5 max)?

I've not examined a large number of bananas but I would suspect most are 
roughly three or four-sided.

Banana fruits develop from an ovary which botany references say should have 
three locules so the fruit should be roughly three-sided (see first photo link 
in references). Therefore, you might expect the peel could separate into three 
parts. If you look at the cross section, you can see the peel is thickest in 
the corners where it naturally separates when peeled. It is also thinner in 
the middle of the three sections. That structure may have something to do with 
it. It might depend on the peeling technique not just the fruit structure. 
Have you tried peeling a lot of bananas to get data on the number of peel 
segments you obtain?

There are a number of cultivated varieties of bananas so they may differ in 
the number of locules and how the peel separates. For example, the second link 
in the references shows what appears to be a four-sided banana and has four 
peel segments.

Before you peel the banana see if you tell how many sides it has and see if 
that influences how many sections the peel separates into.

References



Banana Cross Section Photo


Four-sided? Banana Photo