Saging is found in cultivation throughout the Philippines in many forms and varieties. The Philippines' has different varieties of banana - from the cooking variety named saba, to small sweet latundan, to the bigger exportable bongolan, to red-skinned morado, to full of seeds Espanola, to small, finger-like senoritas.
The male inflorescences (puso) of saba is extensively used as a vegetable. The fibers are made into clothes. The leaves are also used for polishing floors, for lining pots in which rice is cooked, and as wrappers for various foods. The fruits are delicious and very popular as food. Wine, rum, and brandy are prepared from the ripe fruits.
There are many uses to the saging. The saba for example is used as a main ingredient for pochero, a hearty meat stew, and also for sweets like turon, minatamis na saging, ginataan, binayo and others. The leaves are used also for cooking as wraps for ibos, tinumis and others.
The fruits are most valuable and widely used in medicine. The unripe fruit is a valuable article of diet, especially for those suffering from hemoptysis and diabetes, and in the dried state, or preserved with sugar, it is antiscorbutic; it is also useful in diarrhea. Flour made of green bananas is used in cases of dyspepsia with flatulence and acidity. A slight gruel made of banana flour mixed with milk is said to be a tasty and easily digestible article of diet in cases of gastritis. The ripe fruit is beneficial to anemic persons on account of the iron contained in it, and is a valuable food in chronic dysentery and diarrhea when mixed with half its weight of tamarinds and a little common salt