Blue Banana?

If you’re a botanist, you’re probably thinking about the blue Java banana, also called “Ice Cream banana”, a variety known for its silvery-blue skin when unripe and its creamy, vanilla-like flavor and consistency when ripe, but that’s not the point of this question. 

The answer is about the economic "Blue Banana", a banana-shaped corridor in Europe stretching from northwest England to northern Italy, representing a densely populated, heavily urbanized, and industrialized region. It’s considered Europe's economic backbone, containing a high concentration of major cities, financial centers, and a dense network of transport and trade routes. 

The term "economic blue banana" was coined by the media in 1989, inspired by a French geographers’ study led by Roger Brunet, conducted for the French government, in which he identified this powerful urban and economic corridor called the Dorsale européenne (European backbone).  

That region included major cities like London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Milan. It covered areas including northwest England, the Benelux countries, the Rhine-Ruhr area in Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy. 

The whole area was said to be a major contributor to Europe's economy due to its high density of industrial production, financial services, and trade. It also had a significant share of the European population and featured dense infrastructure and interconnected economic networks. 

This study was conducted during a time of rapid urbanization and industrialization in Western Europe, which created this "economic backbone". Later iterations of that originally banana-shaped region was extended into a fork covering the French south-east and going all the way to Barcelona, Spain. 

So, if you didn’t know or remember about that story, keep in mind that all bananas aren’t yellow, or edible!