Is the Banana Kiwi for Real?

A video has shown up in my Facebook timeline several times over the past couple of days. It looks real, and there are many foods that can be grown from scraps like celery or green onions. So the concept of using part of a fruit or vegetable to grow a new edible fruit or vegetable isn't crazy.

But Can There Be a Banana-Kiwi Hybrid?

Can you really take part of a banana and the end of a kiwi, put their flesh together, bury them in a pot, and grow a baniwi, as some people are calling it?

Sorry, but you can't. If you take a close look at the end product, it's clearly not real. It even has a stem to connect it to other bananas — just like bananas that grow on the tree. It's simply illogical, but people are sharing this video with comments like "gotta try this."

If you watched to the end of the video, you'll notice it cuts off abruptly. That's because it's part of a longer video that was an April Fools' joke a few years back, according to Snopes. Someone edited it to look like the real deal, and it went, as they say, viral.

Why Are People Falling for It?

Perhaps it's because instructions and videos like this are so common now — but for real foods. You can grow celery from a celery scrap, so some people think, why not grow a baniwi from a banana and kiwi? Maybe they're confused about hybrid foods. They know it's possible to mix two different fruits or vegetables together and create a new vegetable, like broccolini. Again, they think, "Why couldn't it...?"

But maybe no one is really falling for it. Maybe they're simply posting it to see if anyone else falls for it.

The video has been making the rounds for a couple of months now and seems to be picking up steam again.

Unfortunately, science messes up a good hoax. Hybrid fruits have to come from the same species or genus, and bananas and kiwis do not. There are real hybrid fruits that have been purposely bred for specific results. Check out 10 of them in the video below.