It might seem strange to you that I should feel so strongly about a simple fruit that most people buy and eat without a second thought. However it is incredible to me that an exotic fruit like bananas, that are grown 1000’s of miles away from home and shipped to the US using tons of fossil fuel, has become such an ingrained staple of the American diet. People eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined! While Apples that are grown within a few hundred miles from home and keep for months in a basket in your garage, generally cost twice as much per pound as bananas. How is this possible?
“Banana Barons”, yes, I said Banana Barons… just savor the irony of people getting filthy rich from growing, shipping and selling bananas. These men who founded Chiquita, marketed their product in ways that had never been done before, with discount coupons, catchy jingles and a cartoon. Do you remember the Chiquita Banana song? The Banana Barons also cleared the rainforest in Latin America and kept costs low by exercising iron-hand control over the countries where the fruit was grown denying basic human rights to workers. To give them some credit they also built railroads, communication networks and invented new refrigeration technologies to ensure their product was still eatable when it got to market.
This might not be enough for you to make the switch to apples and oranges but there is a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease that has begun to spread across the world that will eventually affect prices and might even make bananas, as we know them, extinct.
Here’s a link to the Dan Koeppel’s book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World”
http://www.bananabook.org/
{ 0 comments }
