Swedish minister has crippling fear of bananas – media

Swedish Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg has such an acute phobia of bananas that her staff must work around the clock to ensure that she never has to lay eyes on the yellow fruit, Swedish newspaper Expressen has reported.

In a social media post in 2020, Brandberg admitted that she has “the world’s weirdest phobia of bananas.” Her admission was dismissed as an exaggeration until Wednesday, when Expressen published leaked government emails revealing the true extent of her fear.

Before Brandberg attended a lunch at the Norwegian Judicial Agency in February, her cabinet secretary emailed the agency: “Paulina Brandberg has a strong allergy to bananas, so it would be appreciated that there are no bananas in the spaces where she will be staying.”

Ahead of a meeting with a local authority later that month, Brandberg’s secretary was more blunt, telling municipal staff: “no bananas are allowed on the premises either.”

When the speaker of Sweden’s parliament, Andreas Norlen, invited Brandberg for coffee in September, he too received an email informing him of the minister’s banana “allergy.”

“Thank you, there will probably be a cake with the coffee and we’ll make sure it doesn’t contain banana,” Norlen’s office replied. “However, we have fruit baskets with bananas in adjacent spaces and passage rooms. Is it enough if we put these away in the morning of the same day?”

“It will be brilliant if you can put them away in the morning of the same day,” Brandberg’s secretary responded.

While her secretary describes the phobia as an allergy, Brandberg told Expressen that “it is something that I get professional help with.”

“It’s like a kind of allergy, you could say,” she told the newspaper.

Bananaphobia is not recognized by most medical scientists as a legitimate condition, and is lumped in with the generic phobia of “certain foods” in the International Classification of Diseases. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a real, if rare, phenomenon. On the website of Mind, a British mental health charity, one bananaphobia sufferer described how “seeing a banana in real life makes me extremely anxious, I hyperventilate and feel petrified.”

“I know bananas can’t hurt me but for some reason I am full of fear whenever I see or smell them,” she wrote.

Following the publication of Expressen’s article, Brandberg’s fellow MP Teresa Carvalho also came out as a bananaphobe. “I suffer from the same ailment,” the Social Democrat wrote on X. “We may have had many tough debates about conditions in working life, but on this issue we stand united against a common enemy.”