Diving Into the Ingredients That Make Us: Bananas – wayfarersoliloquy
Words and photos by Matt Dursum
For today’s exploration of the ingredients that make us, I’ll be taking on the most ubiquitous fruit on earth—the banana.
It’s kind of funny writing an article about bananas. They’re in every grocery store and their flavor is infused in candies, drinks, and foods all over the world. But there’s way more to their story than just being a boring source of pre-workout energy.
The Story of the Yellow Fruit
Bananas have a long history. People began cultivating them in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago. The fruit was then brought to the Middle East and Africa in the 4th century B.C. and eventually to the Americas in the early 1500s. The modern banana that we know and love today has changed a lot since then.
Bananas were grown along with sugar cane by African slaves in the Caribbean and Latin America. In the 1800s, US companies sent ships to areas where the fruit grew to bring home new products for potential imports. Once the fruit became available in US marketplaces, people loved them. Even the medical community jumped on the banana bandwagon, publicly praising their nutritional and medicinal qualities. Many companies took notice. The largest would become known as United Fruit.
The Evil Octopus
The conglomerate United Fruit was affectionately known around Latin America as El Pulpo, or the Octopus. The reason a banana company had this moniker was because of United Fruit’s tentacles of influence in the region’s politics.
The company worked hard to purchase land and political control. Bribery was one of their preferred tactics, and so was violence. In 1928, workers in Cienaga, Colombia, protested against United Fruit for better pay and working conditions. The company refused to listen and, along with the Colombian government, ordered the indiscriminate massacre of up to 2000 protesters. Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez’s timeless masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, immortalized this tragic event.
During this time, along with coffee and sugar, the fruit underwent intense marketing and advertising in the United States. The American people were spoon fed caricatures, songs, comedy bits, and funny gags created to promote the bananas they were growing for cheap in the so called “banana republics.”
All the while, United Fruit’s shady dealings continued. In 1954, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, went against United Fruit’s influence in his country and attempted to introduce land reforms that would strip away the company’s stranglehold on the Guatemalan agricultural industry. Angered, the conglomerate lobbied its friends in high places in congress. Together with growing anti-communism hysteria, the CIA backed a military coup d’état that led to one of the most brutal military dictatorships in Latin American history.
The Banana’s Changing Face
In the late 20th century, United Fruit changed its name to Chiquita after being acquired by new ownership. Although the company would rebrand itself, its bloody past continues to haunt it and the regions and people who felt its tentacles. Bananas continue to be associated with poor working conditions, overuse of pesticides, and even covers for drug smuggling.
Another problem with the banana is its lack of biodiversity and susceptibility to disease. This is largely because the banana we all know and love is actually one variety called Cavendish. This cardboard cutout of a fruit is able to withstand the diseases that devastated the Gros Michel variety, which reigned supreme during the United Fruit days. Unfortunately, their ability to tolerate high amounts of pesticides makes this possible. And it’s these pesticides that continue to leave hefty environmental impacts on plantations and the health of the people who work with them.
Because our beloved—or loathed—cavendish grows in monocultures and plantations lack biodiversity, they are at risk of being hit by another disease in the future. This would devastate the banana industry and the people who depend on it. Although the industry’s stranglehold on Central America has waned, banana production continues to drive the economies of many countries throughout the tropics.
The banana’s starchy cousin, the plantain, has become an important source of nutrition and carbs for much of the tropics. Plantains can be fried, baked, or added into soups in any stage of ripeness. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find organic or fair-trade plantains due to lack of consumer demand. And because of the inherent need for pesticides and labor, this can be problematic to the people who grow them.
A World of Flavor
Fortunately, for foodies in tropical areas, cavendish is just the surface of banana diversity—a very superficial one at that. From sweet Manzanos and red bananas to the tiny lady fingers we see in some up-scale markets, there are dozens of lesser known varieties to search for.
Arguably the most diverse place to hunt for bananas is its homeland of South and Southeast Asia. Here, a colorful range of bananas grow throughout the year and are sold in markets, grown in gardens, and even used as ornamental foliage in cities. In some places, urban foraging has become a popular pastime and bananas remain one of the most coveted finds.
As many places in this globalizing world learn that they’ve been missing out on true banana flavor this whole time, the lesser known varieties may play a larger role in the industry. Hopefully, this leads to better farming practices and demands for less contaminated and ethical fruit. But, with most of the world’s population earning so little, people are always going to need cheap Chiquita Cavendish bananas or their counterparts to fill their kids’ lunches. Because of this, the unethical practices that keep this fruit affordable may remain in place for a long time to come.