The Things You Overhear in a Grocery Store

SON

Can we get some of these bananas?

FATHER

No. . .they're Dole.

SON

But I want bananas.

FATHER

NO. They're Dole bananas.

SON

But we always get those bananas.

FATHER

No we don't.

SON

Why can't we get them?

FATHER

Cause they keep South America down.

Koeppel Interview Part 7

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. This is the final installment of this series, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

Do you have anything you would like to say to consumers, like the owners of our cooperative about the fate of this fruit that changed the world?

I would like stay to the owners of the cooperative, is that, it is not your fault that you only about one banana. For a hundred years the definition of the word banana has been this banana that we eat called the Cavendish. But there are a thousand other amazing bananas out there. The banana supply chain has been has been constructed so that the only ban that we can get is this banana that we eat. This ban is threatened now, and it an opportunity for us to either lose bananas entirely, or to open ourselves up to this amazing world of bananas. I’m not even exaggerating when by saying that the Cavendish is the white bread of bananas. And in a co-op like yours, people know what white bread is, and it’s not so good.

Foodies, members of co-ops, and people who have the opportunity to control their food destiny a little bit more than the average consumer, you have the opportunity to save the banana for asking for more types of bananas. It’s not just a matter of going to your co-op produce managers, or co-op boards and saying find us more bananas. It’s a matter of actually learning about these other bananas your selves and going a little bit deeper than that. Figuring out where these bananas come form and trying to learn way to get them to the United States.

You’ll here from the banana companies that it’s impossible to get more kinds of bananas into the U.S., and you really do only see one kind. But this is an opportunity, really. This is really a chance. There is a business opportunity here. There is going to be a replacement banana and the question is, who’s gonna bring it. The banana is the most popular fruit in the United States. More bananas are sold than apples and oranges combined. The Cavendish banana is going to go away, we’re almost certain of that. It’s going to take ten, or twenty, or thirty years, but it's going to happen. Who’s gonna introduce those new bananas? Who’s gonna get rich from doing that. Who ever is going to do it going to have to find new ways to ship it, invent new technologies, new supply chains. They’re also going to have and opportunity to make those supply chains, more fair, more equitable more environmentally sound. It’s a big job, but somebody can do it.

Right now, the big banana companies don’t know that the job is ahead of them. They don’t know how to do it, they don’t want to do it, and they don’t understand that they need to do it. So what I would say to the members of Wheatsville Food Co-op and members of food co-op everywhere, and anybody who is out there, and is looking for a business opportunity, or who wants to help change world, well, millions of millions of dollars, and millions and millions of people, and millions and millions of opportunities are out there. The banana is waiting. It’s waiting for somebody to say, “Let’s take this, and let’s change it, and bring more bananas to the American public.” This is a chance.

Right now as the banana exists it doesn’t look all that good for the Cavendish. But it doesn’t look bad for the banana unless things stay the same. And like I said, the real opportunity is that Chiquita and Dole, right now, are pretty much walking around with blinders. That doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t keep our eyes open, and can’t do anything.

.

Koeppel Interview Part 6

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the interview in digestible chunks, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

Can you briefly discuss the politics of the banana industry and banana pricing?

One thing that is really important to understand, is that, the banana was unheard of up until about one hundred and twenty five years ago. When you look at bananas, you have to ask yourself, “Why are bananas so cheap?” This is a fruit that comes from at least two thousand miles away from just about anyone in the United States, maybe a thousand. It has to be shipped under refrigeration. It’s highly perishable. A banana last no more than fourteen days once it’s been cut from the tree, yet it costs significantly less than apples, which are grown one hundred to two hundred miles from most American super markets.

Now when the banana companies came to be, this was there strategy. They needed to make bananas cheap in order to beat apples. To do this they had to be brutal. They basically had to control their costs so radically, that they had to take over countries and enslave people. To make this fruit the number one fruit in the United States, at such cheap prices, they had to do terrible things.

For most of their history, starting in around 1890, and going up though the ‘50’s, and even to a large extent, today, banana companies had to cut a bloody path through Central, and South America. Using the U.S. military, banana companies overthrew governments in that region over twenty times. This what lead to the term Banana Republic, these were countries that were controlled by banana companies.

If any of your readers want to know more, they could look in my book, or they could look at any number of dozens of other books, but some of them might actually remember reading Gabriel García Márquez’s, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and in that book banana workers are massacred in a fictional town in Colombia, after coming out of church during a strike and the year is 1929. After they’re massacred, they and their families, their bodies are thrown into the sea. Well, this actual 1929 massacre really did occur, in Colombia, in the town of Santa Marta.

This massacre was ordered directly by a company called United Fruit against striking banana workers. United Fruit is today known as Chiquita, and it was just one of many massacres that was ordered. So, the history of bananas, and the history of banana pricing is a bloody and terrible one. It’s really important for people to remember, when they think about bananas that there are costs and benefits, and to remember that the banana industry invented globalization, as we know it. And that those issues still reverberate today, and are still important.

When we think about bananas as a product that may be disappearing, and when we think about adding new bananas to the market, and making bananas fairer by adding bananas that might cost more and that might benefit workers more, that we’re also thinking about ways that we might be reversing over a century of unfairness to banana workers who are being forced to work on a crop that is still very much a commodity, and that are still very much sold at prices that don’t allow a lot of help and health to the people that pick them.

Koeppel Interview Part 5

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the interview in digestible chunks, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

I’ve learned from several years of experience working in a natural foods grocery, that many people are concerned, and sometimes fearful of GMO foods, yet it seems clear that in the case of the banana that that route may be the only way to save this food. Do you feel that consumers will set aside their distrust or fears of GM products in order to continue to eat bananas, or will they willingly let them go away?

I don’t think that consumer’s will set aside their fears of GMO products. I think there’s good reason that consumers are not setting aside their fear of GMO. But, I don’t think the proper reason is the product. I think the reason is, let’s call it GMO tactics. I think the issue is not the product necessarily; the issue is the way that GMO has been used as a tactic throughout the world by the big corporations that manufacture GMO seeds, GMO potatoes, and GMO corn. Clearly they have behaved in ways that have made many people rightfully suspicious of GMO, [laughs] of what GMO is as an institution. GMO has been exploitative; GMO has been poorly tested; and GMO has caused damaged, for example with the corn crop and possibly potatoes.

But, you have to separate the idea of the technology from the way it has been executed. There are people who say you can’t, and, you know, I respectfully say that – you need to. You can’t condemn the science. It’s wrong to do that. And in the case of bananas especially, it’s wrong to do that. There are a lot of reasons that bananas are a safe product to genetically modify. Actually, there’s one reason, and I can say it very easily – bananas are sterile. They do not have seeds. They do not have pollen.

The issues that we worry about with GMO, is that seeds and pollen will come out and contaminate other non-GMO products. Without seeds and without pollen, that is impossible. Um, so that won’t happen with bananas. People also talk about allergenicity, and things like that. I personally believe that that is not an issue, and that that is a scare tactic. People will disagree, and I’ll probably get a lot of notes saying that, but I don’t think that’s a big problem. I think there’s a lot of superstition.

Now, is GMO going to save the Cavendish? I don’t think that’s the issue. I’m willing to say that if consumers feel that it’s better to sacrifice the Cavendish because they don’t want GMO, so be it. That’s a consumer product, and that’s fine, they can vote with their pocket book. No problem.

However, there are a lot of other threatened bananas out there, especially those African subsistence bananas that we’re talking about that really, really require GMO. They are equally susceptible to even worse disease. And, they need at least genetic modification to test resistance. Genetic modification is one of the tools, in other words. Scientists, not corporate scientists, but scientists working in the public sector, need to try and find ways to get these subsistence bananas to resist dozens of diseases, that if they spread, people will starve.

I just want people to think about, if they have blanket objections to GMO, and this especially true in the European Union, where objections to GMO prevent research of all kinds, then they are preventing research into GMO being made on subsistence products as well.So, sometimes being against GMO research in a commercial product actually provides legal barriers to research on genetic modification of subsistence bananas. It provides legal barriers against that.

And so, again, if were going to think about the choice we make in our foods, in how it affects the people who pick them, and grow them, then we need to think about those choices in a big sense as well. Genetic modification can be scary, we need to think of that, we need to worry about it, but, it’s not that cut and dry. By issuing a blanket objection without knowing all the issues, we may actually condemn some people who really need genetically modified bananas to not have any opportunity to get them, or at least learn about them.

Koeppel Interview Part 4

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the interview in digestible chunks, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

Your article in the New York Times inspired me to read your book. As a Produce Manager for a Co-op, I felt compelled to share this information with our owners, yet am weary of drumming up fear around the eventual loss of the Cavendish. In your experience since writing Banana, do you feel you’ve had to allay fears from the public, or put out any small fires that your research or writing may have caused?

Yes [laughs]. You know, here’s my one regret in the way I wrote the book, and it’s something that I’ve come to – well I wouldn’t call it a regret… It’s something I wish I would have emphasized more, and something I’ve come to believe more, since I wrote the book, and it’s an answer. It’s kinda the end question – you know, “What’s gonna happen?” – and I talked about it a little bit in the book.

The answer, and this something that you, as a Produce Manager in a co-op, and your members, and anybody who cares about food, and is in an organization where you have a say about food -- in other words, people who don’t shop in supermarkets, you’re the beginning. You are at the Vanguard of the ability to actually say what kind of food you want. There are more, there is more than one kind of banana out there in the world – there are a thousand kinds of bananas. So the answer to allay fears about the Cavendish is to say, “Yes, be afraid that the Cavendish is going to go away, because it will.”

But, there are other bananas out there. Right now the problem is the banana supply chain. As much as you know from reading my book, and being a Produce Manager, that the Cavendish is the only banana you can sell, because that banana supply chain is geared toward the Cavendish, you couldn’t sell another banana right now, even if you wanted to, because that supply chain is so tweaked towards that cheap Cavendish banana. It is possible to change the supply chain. It is possible to come up with technologies to make those fragile bananas transportable. It is possible to find ways to grow those other bananas.

You know, there are so many hundreds of other fruit that have arrived at the U.S. marketplace in the past twenty years, and there are so many amazing bananas, some grown as closely as Brazil. There are amazing bananas grown in India. There are amazing bananas grown in the Pacific. The banana companies will tell you, and since they invented the supply chain, and since, unfortunately, the Fair Trade bananas come down that same supply chain. They have to.
The banana companies will tell you, “No way, the Cavendish is the only one that fits.” Right now, that’s true.

There’s such a thing as being able to get those other bananas. It is possible. By beginning to demand those other banana. By beginning to ask, “How can we modify the supply chain so we can have two, or three, or four different types of bananas?” Just like we have two or three types of apples, four types of oranges, three types of cherries, and just a plethora of different kinds of fruit. That’s the answer. Oh, and by they way, that answer can help save the Cavendish.

By diversifying banana plantations by using proper crop rotation, then all of a sudden, those clean farming techniques begin to have a chance, because Panama Disease begins to kill more slowly. Now, I can add two more little things about that are really, really important.
Number one, the banana industry is going to say, “This is impossible. The Cavendish is the only shippable banana.” Well, when the Gros Michel, the earlier banana, went away, the banana industry said, “It’s impossible, we can’t use the Cavendish, because it’s not a shippable, acceptable, commercial banana.” When this necessity hit, and the Gros Michel went away, they invented technologies that allowed the Cavendish to happen. So… that’s not true.

Number two, the banana companies themselves -- why are they so scared of another banana? I find it amazing. If you go onto the Chiquita or Dole websites and click on the product link, you will see dozens of exotic fruit that these companies themselves import from around the world. So, it’s not as if, even conventionally, they lack the knowledge of how to import weird fruit. They import fruit from all over the world already. That they say that they don’t understand there is a consumer desire for interesting fruit, or that there are methods for importing interesting fruit, is absurd.

And, finally, just to talk about Fair Trade a little bit. Fair Trade is really important, because the plight of the banana worker is miserable. Fair Trade is really a great thing, but Fair Trade does not do a lot for the banana worker because bananas are a cheap commodity. And you can’t help a banana worker that much with Fair Trade, because your only funneling a few pennies down the line. It’s not like Fair Trade coffee, where you can funnel a few dollars down the line to that coffee plantation.

But imagine if you had really exotic bananas. Imagine if you had a range of bananas, ranging from a commodity banana, like a Cavendish for 69¢ a pound, to an exotic banana like a Brazilan Uro, which you could sell for $2.99 a pound. All of a sudden, you’ve got banana plantations with mixed varieties. You’ve got entrepreneurism introduced. You’ve got the ability then for people to own their own plantations and to mix different profitable bananas in there. Then all of sudden Fair Trade bananas become something that actually makes a difference. So, you’ve got opportunities for both the banana industry as a whole for individuals to actually own banana plantations, and for the entire banana industry to transform the model upon which it was founded one hundred and twenty five years ago. And, you’ve got a chance to improve the lot of the Cavendish, to at least extend its life by possibly decades. So what we’re seeing here is just sort of a psychology that says, “It can’t be done.”

In fact, it can be done. As someone who has tasted bananas all over the world, I mean, it’s not just sorta like someone standing there – like me standing in front of a supermarket, with a picket sign saying, “Damnit, give me some more good bananas!” I mean these are like, great bananas. It’s like standing in front of a supermarket, saying, “Give me Hagen Daas!”, when the ice cream inside was junk. These are fantastic bananas, and every single person that shops at your Co-op, I promise, is gonna want to pay two bucks a pound for these Brazilian Uro bananas, because they’re fantastic.

So this is the answer, diversity. Banana diversity, and working on helping to improve the Cavendish’s resistance and all that stuff.

Koeppel Interview Part 3

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the interview in digestible chunks, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

As I read your book, I thought heavily of the dichotomy of experiences surrounding the banana. Here in the States, bananas are basically luxuries. They’re cheap, convenient, consistent, and available year round, whereas, in many African and Asian nations, they are the staple for healthy living, and nutrition. What are your thoughts on this drastically different pair of experiences?

It’s really interesting, you know, the banana is the world’s oldest cultivated fruit. It’s been around for seven thousand years; it is the World’s fourth largest crop. Most people don’t really know this, and to us the banana is sort of this benign thing.

Yet, there are also similarities in the way we that we view the banana. It is, really, to us an essential product. It’s the cheapest fruit we have and it does serve a function as a cheap fruit. It does sort of act, not as much, or even, as a competitor to more expensive fruit such as apples, and oranges; it is that. But also is a competitor to snacks like candy bars and Doritos, and really lousy things that are in the American diet. You know, if you go into a 7-Eleven, you see a basket of bananas up there along the big grab of Cheetos, and the humongous double sized bag of M&M’s. You’re not as likely to see an apple up there – and if you do, that apple is gonna be a really crappy red delicious apple, that’s gonna be mealy and bad. On the other hand, the banana that you get you know is gonna be in good shape, you know it’s gonna taste good. You can tell by looking at it.

So in a sense there is a similarity in the essentialness of the banana here, and the essentialness of the banana in Africa. It’s a stretch, but my point is: we need the banana here, mostly because of the foolishness [laughs] of our industrialized diet. We should eat more bananas. Chiquita has actually – like the one smart thing this company has done – is try, and position this as a convenient food. That’s something the company has done for over a hundred years. I mean, I could talk a lot about the not so smart, and terrible things it’s done, but the idea that the banana sits there in the 7-Eleven, is a great idea. I can’t tell you how many people reach for that banana compared to reaching for the Snickers bar, I think, sadly, probably it’s not enough [laughs], but at least it’s there.

Now, on the other hand, in Africa, the banana is so much more than that. In Africa, the banana is life itself. You go to a village in Uganda the African banana isn’t just eighty to ninety percent of the calories. Now imagine eighty to ninety percent of your calories. Imagine your store with only ten percent of the food that it has now. Imagine your home with just ten percent of what you were able to eat. You would starve.

The banana is that.

In addition, as ninety percent of the calories, the bananas are also responsible for the other ten percent. In a Ugandan village, the banana is part of a village ecosystem. That tree provides shade to grow the rest of that food. So if that tree gets sick, if that tree dies, that shade is gone, and the rest of that food also goes away.

In Africa, were there is a lot of tension, where governments are not stable, without food, there is starvation, and there is war. So the banana is a lifesaver. There are efforts to save the banana, to prevent banana disease, to strengthen the fruit, and to make sure that there are different varieties of banana grown. And that people learn how to recognize banana disease, and do everything that they can to protect the banana against it. It is absolutely essential.
If we lose our bananas it is a terrible, terrible thing, but in Africa, to lose bananas is a death sentence to millions, and millions of people.

Koeppel Interview Part 2

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the interview in digestible chunks, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

Do you think that as the situation worsens for bananas future, that companies like Chiquita will publicly acknowledge the plight of their product? If so do you feel that this will assuage consumer fears that they will lose this staple product?

Chiquita for the very first time about a month ago, mentioned Panama Disease, in a media interview with a reporter in the Cincinnati Inquirer. Panama disease is the disease that has destroyed banana crops in Asia, and throughout much of the world. It’s the incurable disease that threatens the banana crop in Latin America. It has yet to hit Latin America. It most certainly will come sometime in the next thirty years. And, when it comes, assuming that no cure is found, there’s been a fifty year search for a cure, and none have been found, and it’s not likely that one will be found, it will almost certainly wipeout the crop of Cavendish bananas, which is the only kind we eat. It is the only kind that people find in markets, whether they’re organic, fair trade, whether those markets are large supermarkets, co-op or anything. It’s the only export banana available, for the most part.

Chiquita did acknowledge that this disease existed. It was the very first time in over fifty years, that a big banana company acknowledged it. Unfortunately, the acknowledgement was basically to say, “It’s not a problem, we know that it exists, it’s not coming. But if it does come, um, we know what to do. But it’s not a big deal.” Totally wrong. What they said they would do, basically, they were going to quarantine their farms. Now, quarantining farms, which is basically building a fence around them, by using clean farming techniques, has never worked. Australia, which is a first world country, and presumably has the ability to build strong quarantine measures, recently tried to quarantine its farms against Panama Disease, and utterly failed. Chiquita will not succeed with that, and I’m not the only person saying that. Plant pathologists, and banana scientist agree with me on that.

Acknowledging is a good first step, but the banana industry, when the first round of Panama Disease wiped out the earlier breed of banana that Americans grew up on -- starting around 1900 until 1960 -- when that breed was wiped out, quarantine measures were tried, banana companies were in denial, and its being repeated. So, I don’t think the banana industry really understands what’s happening, and what will be happening to it in the future. I don’t think that it’s the end of the banana as a commercial product, I think that there’s a lot of hope.

Koeppel Interview Part 1

Back in early October, I had the opportunity to interview Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed Our World. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the interview in digestible chunks, but if you want to read the piece in its entirety, it is available in both the print, and online versions of the current Wheatsville Breeze.

It’s apparent that you traveled a fair amount to do research for Banana, what areas or populations do you feel are being hit the hardest by banana maladies that Americans may not be aware of?

In terms of being hit hard, I would say that the definition of hit hard is two-fold. The first one would have to do with people who depend on bananas to eat, and pretty much all over the world, wherever bananas are grown, except for our hemisphere, people depend on bananas to eat. Wherever they do, banana maladies are prevalent. We don’t really know about people in Africa, for example, who get ninety percent of their daily calories from bananas.

Wherever bananas are grown, they get very sick, so, you’ll find, for example, in parts of the Congo, Cameroon, Uganda, Tanzania, banana sickness can devastate crop yields by up to eighty or ninety percent. These are people who are dealing with sick bananas, and they’re literally finding that eight or nine out of ten of the bananas that they grow are not coming off the tree. This can lead to starvation. So that’s something we have no idea about, and these banana sicknesses are very virulent, they’re invincible.

Now, on our side of the world, where most of the bananas grown are for commercial use, in other words, they’re the bananas that are grown for us to eat, we don’t have a lot of problems with sick bananas because we spray them against getting sick. The problem is that these sprays in conventionally grown bananas make the workers sick. So the problem with banana maladies is that we cure the bananas and we sicken the banana workers. The sickness of the banana workers has been a problem for sixty years. What you’ll see is that the kinds of sicknesses and kind of sprays have been changed, and that the word from the sprayers is, “well, things have gotten better, we’re using safer chemical now,” and perhaps these chemicals have gotten a little safer, but I would, uh, dispute that they’re safe. And, in fact, even if the chemicals are a little safer, the effects, which can range from cancers, to sterilization, are by no means safe. The other issue is that bananas need to be sprayed more and more as the years go on, because these maladies become more and more resistant.

So, even if thought the most horrible chemicals of all time were probably used farther back in the past, what’s happening now is pretty bad, so the effects of banana maladies is world wide, it’s just who and how they affect that varies across continents.

Bananarama '08!

Oh man. Okay. Last Thursday, I interviewed Dan Koeppel, the author of the book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, for the Breeze. The interview was great. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology it was easy for me to conduct and record an interview via iChat and Garage Band.

I spent most of Friday transcribing the thirty-five minutes of raw audio. This means that I would listen to about fifteen to twenty seconds of the audio at a time while typing, and re-listening for good measure. After about five hours, I was about three quarters of the way finished. I bet my Mac would dictate it to itself, but I haven't figured that out yet. 

I was sitting there, at my dinner table, with headphones on listening to this brilliant interview, when I thought I heard my name being called. I got up and looked around outside, but didn't see anything, so I went back to work. 

Suddenly, at my screen door, was  a dapperly dressed Richard Banana. Coincidence, maybe. Ironic, certainly. Bizarre? Most assuredly. We were going to be playing RISK later that evening with our friend Crissy, but I was so engrossed in the loss of the banana, that I'd spaced on the return of the Banana. 

For some backstory, Richard, Crissy, and I used to have an over two year long game night, every Monday. It was great fun. We had a revolving cast of auxiliary characters, including my old roommate Joseph (who almost always won at RISK, and was prone to loud outburst, as well as thirty minute turns...), Matt Korn, the socialist sweetheart, and a few other folks. 

We mostly played RISK, or RISK 2210 AD (uh, nuking the moon? yes, please). We branched out a few times and played some great games like Zombies, Carcassone, Parcheesi, and The House on Haunted Hill. 

I know, I'm exposing major nerdcore love. However, I'm also earning my Geek street cred. I'm a mean RISK player. Bring it. 

Anyway, there was Richard. Whoa. We played Starship Catan, which was fun, and something I'd like to play again in the future. When we finished, we walked over to Thai Kitchen, where I over ate, before going and purchasing a shiny new edition of RISK. 

RAB and the Starship Catan.

Get some wheat!

I had all the cash.

We went over to Crissy's house, which is right around the corner from my place near Duval and had some beers (and a few shots of Ouzo).  My co-worker Carlos and his fiancee, Katherine, came by, and we raged global domination on a very small, plastic scale. Carlos and Crissy grew up together in Albuquerque, which I had forgotten when I hired Carlos a year or so ago.

All's quiet on the Western Front.

Endgame. Red resigns. Green Dominates. I would have turned in two sets, which would have been fun...

In the end it was a good night. I won. It was a total sleeper game. Lots of build up, then some trap springing. Good times; I won't go into specifics. 

I'll be looking into doing something with the audio of the interview. I will post it here when I figure out how to do that, and may make it into a podcast. Who knows?

Stay tuned. 

Yes! We Have No Bananas, We Have No Bananas Today: Our Impending Reality?

In my role as Produce Manager, I've felt inspired to do some reading on my products -- fruits and vegetables, that is.  Back in June, I read a great op-ed in the New York Times about the potential loss of the worlds primary commercial banana variety: the Cavendish. 

This article was enough to pique my interest, so I bought the book written by the author -- Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. Dan Koeppel had me in his clutches, and I felt that this was relevant to my current profession.

 What would it be like to have bananas as a seasonal fruit, I thought? What would it be like to not have bananas, period?

The answer to the first question is easy enough: normal. The fact that we have bananas year round everywhere in the States -- from California to Maine -- for a low, low price doesn't seem right to me. With all this emerging local food consciousness, how come I haven't heard any one mention our phallic, yellow friend? Bananas are the single highest selling item at Wheatsville -- both organic and conventional -- year-round. One in every kids lunchbox, right?

Over the past century there have been serious ramifications to the commodification of bananas. You've heard of a banana republic, right? It's not just a bougy GAP, it's a country where banana magnates control government, exploit both land and worker, and do pretty much as they please. Our ability to buy that banana for 69¢ a pound, 365 days a year, results in some serious trickle down to the impoverished nations where they are produced (Fair Trade bananas are helping, and organic naners help the workers health by not having to deal with all the crazy chemicals they spray on the conventional ones). 

If the locals start to get uppity, Big Banana will just roll on to the next country, stage a coup (or something), and get their cheap labor on. United Fruits (now Chiquita) has been a major player on the banana scene since Jump Street, and has committed some serious atrocities. Anyway, more on that later, what would the return to seasonal availability do for this fruit, and its shameful industry? I don't know, but it couldn't be worse than the maximum year round output philosophy that currently exists. 

The second question, is a bit more difficult to grapple with. What if there were no bananas? There are two things that I've considered in thinking about this, a) bananas are almost a luxury for us -- year-round availability, consistent flavor and texture, low price, good sliced on cereal, b) for millions of people in other, less affluent, countries bananas are the staple, even more so than rice! 

We've already lost one banana, the Gros Michel. There's a good chance your grandparents got hooked on these, or maybe your rents -- there's an even better chance you've never tasted one, espiecially if your under fifty. They were bigger, and better tasting, ripened evenly, and withstood transport, much like our Cavendish. They were, however, susceptible to Panama Disease -- a blight that devastates banana plantations worldwide. Companies saw that there was no hope for the Gros Michel, and started searching for a worthy replacement that was blight resistant. Enter our Cavendish.

Vendors selling Gros Michel in America back in the day.

Cavendish is smaller, and less tasty than its predecessor, but it was blight resistant. The key word there is was. Infections of Panama Disease have been reeking havoc in Asia for the past few decades, and it's only a matter of time until this new strain makes its way back to our hemisphere. Panama Disease is a ruthless killer. It is transmitted via water, soil, and even air. Someone visiting an infected plantation could easily infect an untainted one merely by havingsome contaminated dirt on their boot. Once it starts to kill, it doesn't stop, and there is no known way to combat it. 

Only recently did Chiquita even acknowledge its existence, despite having spent millions to evade the beast since the Michel days. Attempts to breed new bananas are nearly impossible. Bananas are sterile, have no seeds, and require human intervention to propagate. The worst thing is that every Cavendish is a genetic duplicate of every other one. So, what happens somewhere in the world, will happen anywhere, and everywhere.

Scientist and geneticists have been working on creating a blight resistant variety that would meet all the aspects acceptable for a commercial banana (color, even ripening, skin thickness, taste, texture, etc.), with little luck. The only hope on the horizon for the naner is genetic manipulation.

This concerns some banana companies, and scientists mainly due to the unfavorable stigma that Genetically Manipulated (Modified) foods (GMO's) carry in the public's eyes. Shit. Some EU nations ban them, and they all eat the shit out bananas. So, this creates an interesting and very modern conundrum: we have a possible answer, but due to the ill light cast on GMO foods, they might be able to sell, which in turn means that funding the research for FRANKENANER may become a problem. 

Once again, there are two things to consider -- gee, it would suck if I couldn't slice one in my hemp granola in the morning, and golly, wouldn't it really blow if hundreds of millions of people starved over fucking bananas? Personally the latter carries much more weight. Our commodity is their staple. Many Africans, all over the continent, rely on them. Most of their bananas aren't Cavendish, but they are all susceptible to the same maladies. 

A future without bananas? It may be very real. No one can predict the reemergence of Panama Disease in our hemisphere, but it will happen, and when it does, it's only a matter of time before it does its terrible damage. I don't want to be all gloom and doom, or dissuade you from buying bananas, so eat them, eat them and cherish them, because someday in the near-distant future, they may be gone.