An Instagrammer is showing the world you can actually do quite a few things with banana peels instead of throwing them out.
The Reel was posted on Joe's Garden (@joesgarden.official), which has 352,000 followers and provides "tips to grow fruits and vegetables" as well as upcycling advice.
🗣️ What's your biggest motivation in trying to reduce your personal food waste?
🔘 Saving money 💰
🔘 Helping the planet 🌎
🔘 Not being a wasteful person 😇
🔘 I don't think about reducing food waste 🤷
🗳️ Click your choice to see results and speak your mind
"You can use them to make a quick treat," Joe says in the clip.
The scoop
The video starts with the narrator, Joe, showing some bananas that look like they may be close to going bad.
He opens by saying, "The next time your bananas look like this, you can use them to make a quick treat for you and your plants."
Joe goes on to mash the bananas with a fork and then adds brown sugar and flour and mixes it together "until it forms a dough."
He sprinkles some flour onto a cutting board and places the mashed banana paste onto the board before using a cookie roller to make it look like a pancake.
He brushes some melted butter onto the pancake-like material and then sprinkles some cinnamon. Using a round pizza cutter, he divides the mix into strands and rolls them up until they become a kind of cinnamon roll.
He instructs viewers to "bake the pastries and the skins at the same time."
After baking them, he crushes the banana skins into a kind of powder that he says "can act as a little booster for your plants."
How it's helping
This is an excellent way to reduce food waste while saving banana lovers some money and even promoting plant growth when the peels are used for gardening.
Around the world, around 1.4 billion tons of food are wasted each year.
Unconsumed food represents up to 10% of all planet-warming pollution since food production requires lots of energy for transportation and land use, the latter of which means lots of trees are cut down.
Using banana peels to help your plants can also be highly beneficial, as it prevents the banana peels from going to waste while potentially saving you money since you won't have to use artificial substances to fertilize your plants.
What everyone's saying
Commenters were both excited and confused by the hack.
"Old? These are perfect to eat," one commenter wrote.
"I thought you were going to make classic banana bread, nice little plot twist," another added.
Join our free newsletter for easy tips to save more, waste less, and help yourself while helping the planet.
Cool Picks
