The breadfruit is native to Polynesia where it is baked, boiled or fried as a starchy, potato-like vegetable and made into bread, pie and puddings. In 1789 Britain sent Captain Bligh on the H.M.S. Bounty to Tahiti to collect breadfruit cuttings for introduction into the New World colonies. Enchanted with the Tahitian way of life, the crew mutinied on the return voyage, putting Bligh off at sea in a small boat with 18 loyal followers. Bligh and his men survived a 3,618-nautical mile, 41-day trip to the East Indies. Undaunted, he returned to Tahiti on a second voyage and successfully introduced breadfruits into the West Indies in 1793.

The cultivated banana is often listed in botanical references as Musa x paradisiaca (Musaceae), although it is actually a complex hybrid derived from two diploid Asian species, M. acuminata and M. balbisiana. Common cultivated bananas are usually triploid (3n) with three sets of chromosomes. [Note: The word "set" is defined here as one haploid set of chromosomes.] If A represents one set of chromosomes from diploid M. acuminata (AA) and B represents one set of chromosomes from diploid M. balbisiana (BB), then hybrid bananas have three sets of chromosomes represented by AAB, ABB or another 3-letter (triploid) combination of A's and B's. Like seedless watermelons and red grapes, bananas are sterile and do not produce mature seeds. [Sometimes you can find aborted ovules inside the fruit that appear like tiny black dots.] Bananas are sterile and seedless because they are odd polyploids in which one set of chromosomes (A or B) has no homologous set to pair up with during synapsis of meiosis. Therefore meiosis does not proceed normally, and viable gametes (sex cells) are not produced. Since banana fruits (technically berrylike ripened ovaries) develop without fertilization they are termed parthenocarpic. Without viable seeds, banana plants must be propagated vegetatively (asexually) by planting corms, pieces of corms or sucker sprouts.