Banana
Banana plants include several species in the genus Musa known for their long, starchy fruits. These plants originally come from India, Southeast Asia, and Sahul, but humans spread them across the world centuries ago. The especially sweet, yellow variety known as the Cavendish spread furthest, becoming a major staple across the world in the final centuries of civilization, but nearly all of these trees had the exact same genetic code and required intensive human intervention to propagate. With the collapse of civilization and the intensive techniques used on ancient banana plantations, the familiar Cavendish banana has all but gone extinct. Instead, bananas in the Fifth World come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, from red, pink, purple or black, to soft dessert bananas like the ancient Cavendish to the firmer cooking bananas (sometimes caled “plantains”), and an even wider selection of wild varieties.
#Human usage
People of the Fifth World enjoy dessert bananas raw, as one would any raw fruit. They also use the trees for fiber, use the leaves to eat on or to wrap meat in, and ferment the fruits to make banana wine or (if adding a grain for yeast) banana beer.
#Specialization
A community that specializes in relationship with bananas will invariably tend towards horticulture, and therefore live in settled villages. Often these communities practice slash-and-burn agriculture, growing different guilds of plants at different stages and moving around the jungle in a regular cycle. This often includes banana trees at a relatively late stage in this cycle, planted in traditional "banana circles" with cassava, lemongrass, sweet potato, and taro.