Bananarama

Peeling away the banana’s cheerful skin

By Lisa Wogan

July 14, 2008

My earliest banana memories are of throwing them away. Two or three times a week, I’d retrieve from my lunch sack a mottled yellow specimen, battered by a long bus ride and several hours in a backpack. I salvaged only the fruit’s blue-and-yellow Chiquita stickers, which I stuck on my notebook like wallpaper, testimony to waste I didn’t appreciate at the time.

At home, however, bananas were different — even the overripe ones. They were foundational to my first cooking experiences. The only thing I really ever baked as a kid was The Joy of Cooking’s no-fault banana bread. I loved mixing the simple recipe from memory and the taste of banana pulp folded into the batter. Once baked, though, the bland bread never really lived up to the promise of the batter-coated spoon, unless I slathered a slice in butter and broiled it in a toaster oven. (Recently, I discovered an even better version of banana bread at my neighborhood bistro: banana bread pudding topped with vanilla ice cream, walnuts, and caramel sauce.) Over time, the potassium-rich tropical fruit moved onto my shredded wheat and into my smoothies and chocolate milkshakes. At Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor, my favorite dessert was the oversized banana split known as the Pig’s Trough.

The Cavendish, America’s favorite — and practically only — banana.

Through it all, the banana was a consistent, ubiquitous, and workmanlike staple that I — and pretty much everyone I knew — took for granted. I failed to let certain niggling details sink in, even as I ate three or four bananas a week. I ignored the fact that bananas have no season and no seeds; that, although they’re imported from thousands of miles away, they’re often cheaper than apples grown nearby; and that most American grocery stores only sell one type of banana, even though hundreds of banana varieties are grown around the globe.

A closer consideration of the banana reveals — or reminds, depending on your banana knowledge — that, for all its ubiquity and uniformity, this lunch-pail comfort food is a thoroughly strange fruit, with an appalling legacy of environmental degradation and socio-political oppression. That’s history; what’s news is that its destructive past may soon catch up with the banana, as disease and globalization combine to wipe it out. Within a decade or two, the big yellow banana we’ve all come to take for granted will, in all likelihood, disappear.

The banana backstory

Deep-fried, baked, sliced into salads, mashed into cakes, dried, or simply peeled, bananas are adored around the world. They are the number-one fruit crop on the planet, and the fourth major food after rice, wheat, and milk. In many countries, local varieties of bananas are the main source of calories; in Uganda, for example, people eat approximately 500 pounds per person per year. Here in the U.S., where imported Cavendish bananas are the single most popular fruit, Americans eat an average of 25 pounds per person annually, more than oranges and apples combined.

Before I wade too deeply among the banana corms (the root balls from which new banana plants grow), let me clear up my use of the term “banana.” I’m talking about the bananas North Americans and Europeans love: sweet dessert bananas, à la Bananas Foster, which are usually eaten raw. I’m not talking about plantains, the banana’s firmer, starchier cousins, which are often cooked like potatoes in Africa and Latin America.

Sweet dessert bananas have been an American favorite almost since they first appeared on grocery shelves in the mid-19th century. Imported from Central America and the Caribbean, bananas were available as a luxury item following the Civil War — and were sold peeled, sliced, and wrapped in foil for 10 cents each (the equivalent of about $2 today). By the late 1800s, they’d become inexpensive substitutes for all-American apples. Twenty years later, ordinances outlawed peels on sidewalks as a public nuisance. Only in recent years have processed snack foods dented the domestic appetite for bananas.

The backstory to bananas in every kitchen, however, is a tale of agribusiness woe. Many writers have chronicled the banana’s role in Third World politics and environmental destruction; two of the most recent banana-ologies are Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World and Peter Chapman’s Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World.

I never imagined the humble banana shaped much more than a fruit salad. But as Koeppel and Chapman tell it, maverick banana barons invented mass production, monoculture, and the modern multinational corporation. The biggest and baddest banana company, United Fruit, spearheaded approaches to cultivating and transporting delicate bananas with innovations, such as the first refrigerated fleets, atmosphere-controlled storage rooms to control ripening, and ship-to-shore radio systems to coordinate harvesting and shipping. When disease and fungus threatened crops, United Fruit engineered an immense industrial pesticide-delivery system.

As American-owned plantations spread through Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and Panama, banana barons controlled and sometimes destroyed nations. They exploited labor and exposed workers to lethal toxins. They deployed thug power and the Central Intelligence Agency to prop up friendly dictatorships (hence the term “banana republic”) and bring uncooperative governments to heel.

The fingerprints of United Fruit alone are all over a 1911 coup in Honduras, the brutal suppression and murder of workers during a strike in Colombia in 1929, and a bloody, CIA-engineered overthrow of the first democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1954. And that’s just the tip of the banana plant.

Even today, banana multinationals leave an ugly wake. In 2007, Chiquita (formerly United Fruit) was fined $25 million by the U.S. Department of Justice for making payments to an “acknowledged terrorist organization” in Colombia — tough guys protecting the fruit company’s interests. And Dole (formerly Standard Fruit) was sued in U.S. courts for using chemicals that render workers sterile. But still we love our bananas.

Banana propaganda

My dad spent some of his earliest years among broad-leafed banana plants in Panama, where his father was stationed with the U.S. Army. He remembers an enormous bunch of green bananas always hanging off the back porch, ripening yellow and a little brown in the sun. “I’ve known about brown dots since I was four,” he told me recently. His pre-Depression years were filled with perfect sweet bananas and stories of big hairy spiders hiding in bunches. But most of us have no firsthand memories of equatorial banana culture, and much of what we know and feel about the sunny fruit has been systematically planted in our brains to the soundtrack of the unshakeable Chiquita banana jingle.

It’s not just that we put bananas on cereal as directed by advertisements, or that we make banana pudding from a recipe on the Nilla Wafers box (my brother’s birthday choice), or that we believe fruit shipped in refrigerated containers should never be refrigerated at home (a company ploy to shorten shelf life and drive sales). No, banana companies have left nothing to chance or taste buds. As avidly as they hacked through jungles, they molded our banana consciousness.