A few fascinating things I’ve learned from Dan Koeppel’s op-ed, “Yes, We Will Have No Bananas”:
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Bananas travel thousands of miles, rather than hundreds, and spoil in weeks, rather than months, yet they cost half as much as apples.
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Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined.
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Bananas became popular in North America only after aggressive marketing.
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Despite the existence of more than 1,000 varieties, bananas in the US are all the same: the Cavendish.
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The Cavendish is inferior in taste to the banana our great-grandparents ate.
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Reliance on a single variety of banana will eventually result in another widespread crop destruction due to disease.
Bananas in Egypt were different—and grown locally along the Nile, no less. Now I feel guilty for calling them “weird bananas.”
Readers of food literature are familiar with the dangers of monoculture. It’s a shame that the industrial-age techniques we developed to make food cheap and accessible to everyone have also brought us inferior taste, reduced nutritional value, and increased susceptibility to disaster.
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I saw that op/ed, too. Actually, though, if you want the true authoritative book on bananas, environmental change, United Fruit, and US-Honduran relations, you need to read John Soluri’s amazing bit of scholarship, Banana Cultures. It’s one of the best books I’ve read for prelims, for sure, and is really quite an engaging read for an academic book. Soluri brings in more of the tropical medicine and labor history stuff, I think, as well as the environmental change aspects as they relate to disease. There are so many fascinating stories to be told about the relationship between plant health and human health, particularly as they relate to agriculture! We’re really only beginning to scratch the surface of this area, academically.
Another amazing read along this vein is Douglas Sackman’s Orange Empire , also one of the more amazing works of environmental history I’ve read lately. He manages to bring labor history, cultural analysis, agriculture, science, and environmental history all together in his analysis of citrus culture in California (another great drama of 19th- and 20th-century agriculture, food production, distribution, labor relations, and marketing); it’s really an astonishing book. If I can write something anywhere near as good as either of these guys, I’ll have it made.