A real banana split: Bizarre fruit sparks double delight for fun runner

We are all used to ‘buy one, get one free’ offers at the supermarket, but it seems Mother Nature sometimes comes up with her very own BOGOF deal.

Organisers of a charity fun run stumbled across this remarkable double banana among a batch provided for competitors.

The larger than usual fruit was spotted the day before the World Cancer Research Fund race.

A-peeling: The double fruit inside a single banana skin was discovered by a charity worker

A-peeling: The double fruit inside a single banana skin was discovered by a charity worker

And when one organiser peeled back the skin she found two bananas, crammed tightly side-by-side like two fingers of a Twix.

Even more bizarrely, the charity run in London’s Hyde Park was billed Beat the Banana! – a race in which competitors attempt to overtake an athlete dressed as a banana.

Teresa Nightingale, general manager for WCRF, said: ‘We’ve been doing fruit giveaways as part of our Fruity Friday campaign for some years now, but no one here has ever seen anything like this before.

‘If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would probably have thought it was a joke – I’d love to know whether anyone else has ever seen anything like this.

‘It just seems such an amazing coincidence that we discovered our “double banana” the day before our Beat the Banana! fun run.

‘I think it’s this banana that will take some beating.’

She is right. The find is exceptional, with experts describing the fruit as a ‘freak’.

The fruit was donated by Dole Fresh UK, which sponsored the Fruity Friday event, organised to raise awareness about the importance of eating fruit and vegetables.

Ken Manning, a plant scientist at the University of Warwick, said he had never seen one before. He said it was likely to have been caused during the fruit’s early development.

‘It’s very, very unusual,’ he added.

A spokesman for The Caribbean Banana Exporters Association expressed his surprise, saying that they had never encountered any double bananas before.

The find turned out to be good value of the charity as bananas are particularly expensive at the moment.

Last month, they were selling for 97p per kilo in the big four supermarkets, 35 per cent up on the same period last year.