Today, we’re talking about bananas.

Aside from everything we know having gone bananas in 2020, I bet you’re wondering, why are we talking about bananas? Well, for the same reasons we’ve talked about honey or avocados or kale…there’s more than meets the eye.

Bananas are the world’s most beloved fruit – even animals love bananas. The world eats about 100 billion bananas every year, about 27 pounds of bananas per person, making it the 4th most popular agricultural product, following rice, wheat and milk. In fact, there have been more songs written about bananas than any other fruit. You know the songs…right? These songs make us feel happy to eat bananas. 

 

Well, by the end of this episode, you might still want to eat bananas, but my guess is, you’ll look at them a little differently. We’ll pull back the curtain on bananas and their second imminent extinction, we’ll look at the industry as a whole and who the big bananas are who own the market, the history, the communities impacted by the mass production of bananas…and we’ll see whether the opportunity cost of eating a banana for breakfast tomorrow or, blending it up in your smoothie, or scarfing down that slice of banana bread leaves the same taste in our mouths.

So, let’s quit monkeying around and get into it! 

Consider this…the average healthy adult has sex three times a week – which by most accounts is a healthy sex life. We know there are many physical and mental benefits of having an orgasm. There are doctors and experts all over the internet telling us this fact. So, if you’re getting lucky 3 times a week, that’s great. Compare that to the average of 15-20 meals we eat every week – a multiple of at least 3, right? And we know that there’s a direct correlation to what we eat and how we feel. Our health outcomes, both mentally and physically are impacted by what we eat….so WHY on earth wouldn’t we be talking about food more than we talk about sex?

If you were having sex with someone that had an STD, or put your health at risk, would you keep having sex with them? Maybe…some people have higher risk tolerances than others. Plus modern medicine has evolved to, air quotes, cure some sexually transmitted diseases. We could say the same about other diseases linked to food, but the comparison still remains, despite the marvels of modern medicine. I’m not going to belabor the point and it’s not my job to tell you what to do…I’m sure you see where I’m going with it.

And I realize that talking about sex is just more provocative than talking about food. 

I don’t do these episodes to make you feel bad about eating. I understand that food is a choice, just like sex. We can eat whatever we want. But we need food to survive or we die. We could argue that we need sex, which might be true for many, but we can survive without sex…some for months years on end depending on individual circumstances. We know the risks involved in having sex, and I’m sure many of us realize the risks involved in eating specific foods in our food supply chain. However, after 45 episodes, it seems glaringly apparent that we are the ones getting the banana in the tailpipe. If you know what I mean…..

So, how did we come to love bananas?

Most of us have eaten bananas our entire lives. We haven’t lived in a time where bananas were not available. We’re going to get into the history a little bit in a moment, but I want to say first, that I have largely refrained from offering my opinions in these episodes because it is important that we all think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions. I personally draw from my experience as a foodie, educator, teaching game theory and economics, and uh, just being a compassionate human being, and a lot and those experiences help me discern opportunity costs. It helps me understand what the trade offs are for the decisions I make. Digging into these topics help me see the whole picture behind specific foods and that is what Adam Smith – the God Father of modern economics – calls “perfect information”. 

When we don’t know what we don’t know, we can’t make informed decisions that are in our best self interest. What is really compelling about the banana industry to me is, it initially set out to offer a product that was half the price of an apple. It endeavored to make the banana so popular that it would be a part of the world’s breakfast for billions of people, and the company behind it – United Fruit Company, was going to do that, by any means necessary. And guess what? It did. 

One of the means by which bananas became so well loved and consumed is deeply embedded in propagandistic public relations tactics, thanks to Ed Bernays. 

If you don’t know who Ed Bernays is, well…he’s the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the mastermind behind legendary marketing campaigns that changed people’s perceptions, behavior and even toppled governments. Most notably, he is the one who created the marketing campaign in 1929 that made it acceptable for women to smoke cigarettes in public by calling them “torches of freedom”. Ultimately this campaign and Lucky Strike became a symbol of gender equality at the time.

He is also the one who created a marketing campaign that encouraged us all to eat what we call the “all American breakfast” of bacon and eggs. Americans were happy eating coffee, toast and orange juice as the first meal of the day, but the Beech-Nut Packaging Co was struggling to sell one of it’s products…bacon. So, they called in the master of spin, Ed Bernays to help them sell it with the endorsement of doctors.

But it was the marketing campaign that Bernays created featuring an animated singing banana, which he made for the United Fruit Company that changed the banana industry and Guatemala, forever. 

So, let’s peel this banana…

If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast than you know that in almost every episode since Season 1 – we’ve talked about a variety of foods and ingredients ranging from kale to honey, to chicken, to corn and now bananas. We’ve talked about corporate collusion, willful deception, the chemical poisoning of our food, our soil, our air, our water. We’ve talked about the corporate control of our food and CEO’s, shareholders and lobbyists who are  complicit in egregious acts committed against the environment, animals and people in developing countries that produce our food. 

We’ve talked about the effects of these realities on our health, on our immunity, to our healthcare system and on our ability to heal and thrive. We’ve talked about our economy and the “profits over people” global model that keeps us all enthralled in systems of inequity and subjugation. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but it’s the reality that lives behind all the fancy packaging and additive laden foods we eat. It’s the engine that drives the connection between our food and our health outcomes and it’s the gnarsty stain underneath it all that few of us see, but we all experience – directly or indirectly.

The United Fruit Company was founded in 1899 by a guy named Minor Keith that merged with Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit Company.

Through a series of mergers, it eventually became known as Chiquita Brands International – which is what it is to this day. Bananas originated in Southeast Asia, and were brought to the West by Arabian conquerors and eventually to the Caribbean and Central and South America. The mass production of bananas really started exploding in the early 1900’s and bananas hit the mainstream market in the 1920’s but bananas, and many different varieties of them have been around for thousands of years.

I definitely encourage you all to watch Bananaland or read the book called Banana to learn the details about how the banana industry became violent, unjust and litigious. But to give you a quick rundown of how UF changed the game for bananas, let’s talk history. 

Minor Keith was the nephew of a guy named Henry Meiggs, who was a railroad contractor in Costa Rica and he was in contract with the government there to build the railroad from the capital city of San Jose to the port of Limon in 1871. When Meiggs died a half dozen years into the project, Keith took over the project and started experimenting with growing bananas so that he could cheaply feed his workers. Ultimately, the Costa Rican government defaulted on its payments so Keith borrowed money from the Bank of London to finish the project and restructure the debt of the Costa Rican government. In exchange, the administration there  agreed to give Keith 800,000 acres of tax free land plus they gave him a 99 year lease on the operation of the train route. So Keith figured out quickly that transporting passengers from San Jose to Limon wasn’t going to pay his bills, so he began exporting his bananas to Limon and exporting them from Limon to the US…which proved much more lucrative.

Jump forward 40 years, and by 1930 the United Fruit company owned 3.5 million acres of land throughout Central America and the Caribbean, and it was the largest landowner in Guatemala.

This gave UF great power over these governments and this business model became what we all know as a “banana republic”. The story continues, but in the interest of time, the one notable event that took place in Colombia in 1929 was the Banana Massacre, which was initially a worker’s strike (because the workers wanted fair pay, 8 hour work days, and they wanted to unionize. This massacre was backed by the Colombian government, its army, and in partnership with UF which resulted in the death of as few as 47 up to as many as 2000 Colombian UF workers.

So this is the way things go…hire cheap labor, work them to the bone, pay them as little as possible, don’t give them rights, health care, or fair pay, and if these companies are in bed with the government, is paying off the military groups, and making millions of dollars, and also control land and resources, well…it’s a case of do what I say or else. Big banana bullies. And that was then….

Things haven’t really changed since.

The big bananas in the industry go after anyone who tries to inform the public about the inner workings of the industry – aka the dark side of bananas.

There have been several documentaries made and books written about the banana industry, namely and most recently, “Bananaland : Blood, Bullets and Poison”, directed by Jason Glaser and Diego Lopez which premiered in 2014. Before that documentary, there was another documentary called “Bananas”, directed by Swedish filmmaker Fredrick Gertten which exposed the banana industry’s use of DBCP, which we’ll talk about that in a moment. Gertten was quickly sued by Dole, but the case was eventually dropped. There was a follow up movie to Gertten’s Bananas movie called “Big Boys Gone Bananas” which didn’t get much traction. Finally, Dan Koeppel wrote a book called “Banana : The Fate of the Fruit That Changed The World”. 

All of these movies and books dive into the history of the industry, who the players are, and who the banana industry impacts the most : the workers and communities where bananas are grown. Many of them are suppressed…what do these banana monopolies have to hide?

Well, apparently, there’s a lot to hide. To quote a union worker and activist, that works in the banana fields….Jaime Moscera says :

“What I want for my people, the hard-working people of my village is real progress. We want the aerial spraying to end. We want them to stop killing us because they are eradicating our livelihood. What I want for my people is to have a dignified salary for us to be able to survive. And we don’t want to be exploited anymore. So I say to each of you Americans, be aware of what you are eating. Take notice of the conditions we work under, and how much we suffer in the fields in order to export this fruit to you. Meanwhile, the businessmen enrich themselves and gorge on our work, our efforts and our youth.”

 

Just sit with that for a moment….before we talk about our consumption and the production of bananas.

Let’s be aware of what we are eating.

At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that around the world, we consume about 27 pounds of bananas, per person, per year. Currently we are eating a cultivar of banana called the cavendish banana. Before the Cavendish, there was the Gros Michel – the first mass produced cultivar which had a stronger banana flavor. This variety went extinct by the late 1960’s due to a thing many farmers are familiar with – Fusarium wilt, but is also known as Panama disease. The Cavendish is currently facing extinction for the same reasons, but a different disease.

Bananas are grown as a monoculture, which makes them highly susceptible to disease. To keep the price of bananas low, which was its stated primary goal from the jump, using chemicals is the only option to control fungus and pests. The most infamous chemical used on bananas is DBCP – Dibromochloropropane. It has been used in agriculture since 1955, and was manufactured by the Occidental Chemical Company in California. By 1977, workers at the plant – almost every single male working there – was sterile. So by 1979, the EPA banned its use in the US….

So, there was an abundant supply of this chemical sitting around and someone had the bright idea to ship it off to other international markets where there were no regulations and use it on agricultural crops there. Hence, it’s continued use on banana fields. 

Here’s where things really go bananas…

There are millions of acres of bananas growing in places like Guatemala and Ecuador that encircle small communities. Spraying of the banana fields has gone from 10x a year to 40+ times a year and it literally happens within feet of innocent people’s homes. Just one externality of the spraying has caused a huge increase in the number of children born with physical and  neurological disabilities. The environmental impacts are also a huge problem as you can imagine. There’s the destruction of lands and wildlife and innumerable ecosystems. Despite the “sustainability” initiatives these corporations put into place, there’s ongoing contamination of water and air, forests, soil, while banana fruit companies rake in $500 million dollars but don’t give an extra dime to their workers on the front lines blah, blah, blah…you know all this. 

So, this is the best part of this and every episode…what can we do?

If you’re still reading, then there’s hope. There are things we can do. We can choose bananas that are fair trade.

Although fair trade bananas cost more to us, the price reflects the true cost to those who produce fair trade bananas. Fair trade bananas really only make up about 3% of the total banana market, so they might be difficult to find.

We could stop eating so many bananas…we could. If you think about it, bananas travel thousands of miles, on trains, planes and cargo ships. That has an impact on our environment so if we really care about the environment, then it stands to reason that we wouldn’t buy bananas. There aren’t very many banana producers in the US, but if there is one near you, I encourage you to support that company.

If you just don’t want to stop eating bananas because of the nutrition, there are other fruits and vegetables that contain more potassium than bananas. Avocados for one. Of course, the avocado industry has some of the same problems as the banana industry, so if you listened to that episode, then you know the reasons why buying California avocados is better than buying avocados from anywhere else. Sweet potatoes is another one. Of course, putting sweet potatoes in your smoothie isn’t a thing, but sweet potato bread is delicious. Sweet potatoes are grown all over the country, in warm climates and they tend to be seasonal, so this is the time of year that we really see a lot of sweet potatoes. There’s also many bean varieties that contain more potassium than a banana – and you can grow your own beans, by the way.

If it’s the taste and convenience of the banana that keeps you on the banana train, well….that’s hard to beat but there are other fruits that come in their own wrapper for easy consumption on the go. If you just love the taste of bananas…there’s really no other fruit that tastes like a banana.

The one thing that has always been interesting to me is behavioral economics. I often think about the book written by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. This book is about a lot of things, but most notably, how we behave like goslings, just following each other, self-herding and making decisions based on past behavior – whether it’s good or bad. We make decisions, thousands of them everyday, based on our preferences – likes and dislikes. We make decisions based on our constraints around trading time for money, and we make decisions based on our best self interest. I’m not suggesting that we change that…but I am suggesting that we consider the tradeoffs and opportunity costs of our decisions more often. 

We can’t force companies to do better because companies are run by people – humans with flaws.

We can’t force people (like our legislators, CEO’s and corporate billionaires) to be better people with a strong moral compass – that responsibility and choice is an individual choice. We are all facing a plethora of problems everyday, and we make decisions to try and solve those problems as best we can. The truth in the matter is, we can all be better. And like I said in the beginning, the reality is, we all eat more than we fuck, so let’s keep talkin’ about what’s really going on in our food supply! Connect with me on the socials to keep the conversation going. 

That’s it y’all. It’s that time of year where we take time to rest and reflect on our lives, our health, our finances and our world. That’s what I’m gonna do, and I hope you do too. I’m going to take a little break, so make sure that we’re connected somehow, so you get updates. You can sign up on foodslain.com for my newsletter to get exclusive podcast updates if you want to. Or not…whatever. You get to choose. 

But before you go, I want to wish you and your family happy holidays. Stay safe, be healthy, eat clean…and I’ll see you on the other side of the plate. Chow.