Yes, You Have New Bananas

Today, bananas are just a delicious, fruity fact of life. But being able to buy these curvy, golden delicacies in places where it’s too cold to grow them is actually a very recent development in the big picture of human history. Understanding the banana's past actually tells us a lot about the modern world—about economics, politics, technology, and even why we keep getting annoying popup ads for magical fruit-based cures.

Join your favorite professional historian on this golden, slightly curved voyage through time, from the ancient Indian Ocean region through the present-day Western world. Discover how the banana has been adored throughout the ages. Explore why this fruit was once feared as a threat to civilization itself. And find out why bananas are as much a part of the Industrial Age as more obvious products like steel or petroleum.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode 6 | Doug Sofer

Yes, You Have New Bananas

©2023 Doug Sofer

Intro

Welcome back to this farm-fresh podcast about the power of history to help us us better grasp the Strangeness of Now.

•   [pause]

•   You know, listener, people of the past are both similar to and different from us.

•   On one hand, historical people were biologically the same and so lived within the same basic physical confines of the human condition as those of us today and therefore [rising static noises and then parts of talk cutting out]… bject to the [static] —imitations of [static]—ow our species—[static]

•   [pause]

•   Hang on folks—[static]—like this podcast is picking up some interference from a popup ad service. Give me a sec as I try to—

•   [Static]

•   [with jingly music]

•   Eighteen Superfruits That Will Shield Your Body From Free Radicals—and Spice Up Your Love Life! Number EIGHT will ASTONISH AND DELIGHT YOUR BRAIN! Click here for details!

•   [Longer static]

•   Sorry. I got my signal back. Not sure what happened there. So let’s get back to—[static]—terfloss—

•   [Static] 

•   I went from flab to fab by eating nothing but [overly articulated] açaí berries and THIS SECRET FRUIT-BASED INGREDIENT! Click here for this closely-guarded formula that the elites at Harvard Medical School and NASA are trying to keep for themselves!

•   [Static]

•   —is what philosophers of history call “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” which refers to—

•   Wait, it says the popups broke in again? Let me check my security settings.

•   [clicking and typing]

•   Okay. Think I found the issue. We shouldn’t get any more interrup—

•   [static]

•   [Aussie accent?]

•   Wrinkled skin? Fatigue? Hair loss? Stinky elbows? The culprit is maligno-toxins—poisons that build up in your cellular residues where they fester and interfere with your happiness centers! Our exclusive blend of mangosteen, snakefruit and [Braz. Pronunciation] jabuticaba powders instantly dissolves maligno-toxins on contact! Order now and Re-Rejuvenate Your Bestest Inner You!

•   [Long static]

•   …which is probably the single most important thing you’ll ever learn in your life so I hope you were taking careful notes.

•   [static]

•   No—don’t tell me it took over my feed again?!?

•   [pause]

•   [Sighing] I’ve just upgraded my popup blocker to a double platinum license. It’s expensive, but it should stop these interruptions once and for all.

•   [pause]

•   And it’s worth it because I loathe popup ads.

•   I especially dislike those kinds of campaigns that you just heard breaking into my show.

•   Every few years it feels like there’s some new set of tropical fruits that get rediscovered and touted as the next big superfood—supposedly full of nutrition and possessing miraculous healing properties.

•   [pause]

•   But you know what? Those kinds of ads are yet another reason that knowing something about history is really important.

•   [pause]

•   With a little historical perspective you learn that some of these palatable plant products have been well known for thousands of years. 

•   They only seem exotic because they never really caught on with consumers in some parts of the world.

•   Fruit-sellers hope that by relabeling them, they can push into new markets and make them the next big thing.

•   [pause]

•   At the same time, when you investigate evidence from the past, you learn that some fruits that are now common were once new—and strange.

•   [pause]

•   Take, for example, the humble banana.

•   Not that long ago, only people living in the hot places where bananas actually grow could find these curvaceous crescent-shaped creature comforts for sale nearby.

•   But as we’ll investigate today, a number of different converging global trends led to a lucrative trade in bananas that would come to shape the late 19th and early 20th centuries in multiple surprising ways.

•   [pause]

•   And sure, I know that you may have just been trying to have something nutritious to slice up into your sugar-oat-crunch-ems without your new favorite podcaster trying to turn it into to a whole big thing.

•   But I promise you, it’s going to be fine: I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to help people like you through situations exactly this one.

•   My name is Doug Sofer. And I’m a weirdo. Just. Like. You.

Theme [0:45 seconds following vamp], includes appeal for sponsors

•   Fake popup ads notwithstanding, You Are A Weirdo is currently entirely commercial-free.

•   If you’d like to support this show, go to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to learn what you can do to keep these episodes coming.

When Bananas Were New

•   Europeans, North Americans, and others who live in cold places once thought that bananas were foreign and exotic—like feijoa is today—or palmira fruit—or sapodilla—or lakoocha.

•   In other words, there’s plenty written about those fruits, and if you’ve traveled abroad you may have tried one or two of these guys.

•   But generally speaking, they’re just not available in most typical U.S. supermarkets.

•   And needless to say, You Are A Weirdo—

•   [divebomb]

•   …is the name of this podcast, so we’re ideally situated to think about the changing meanings of these kinds of agricultural products as humanity has traveled through time.

•   [pause]

•   Today’s episode is called “Yes, You Have New Bananas”

•   [pause]

•   What transforms an odd-looking, tropical fruit from a regional delicacy like Brazilian jaboticaba or Jamaican ackee, into an international best-seller like bananas?

•   It’s got to do with a combination of factors. Some are related to the properties of the fruit itself.

•   Another variable has to do with marketing and the appeal of the fruit to local tastes and cuisines.

•   Still other issues include technologies of transportation, distribution and retailing—and how long a fruit can be stored before getting rotten and stanky.

•   [pause]

•   Finally, the story of the banana also has something to do with international politics and military muscle-flexing during the second half of the 19th century.

•   In other words, we’ve got a lot to cover in order to understand this plant.

•   [pause]

•   Before we can even explore this history, though, you’ll notice I said “plant” and not “tree.”

•   That’s because banana trees are not actually trees.

•   True trees have trunks that are made out of wood—and banana plants’ trunks meanwhile are made out of nested sets of enormous, thick, rolled up leaves.

•   That’s why you anyone trying to sell you a bananawood credenza is not to be trusted.

•   [pause]

•   Ancestors of modern banana-non-trees originally come from places like the modern island nations of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines; the Southeast Asian peninsula countries of Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos; and the East Coast of India and the Southern portions of China.

•   If you’ve been paying attention to previous episodes of this podcast—and you should have been—you’ll recognize these places as being smack dab in the middle of the world’s most important trade basin: The Indian Ocean—the region that first traded tea and sugar and all kinds of other good things too.

•   [pause]

•   Scientific evidence gathered by a team working from different fields of study—genetics, linguistics, and archaeology—show that bananas have been traveling from New Guinea to as far away as western Africa for at least two-thousand, five hundred years (2,500) years.

•   The first written records of bananas show up in the Indian subcontinent in the 600s BC or BCE.

•   And we know that the ancient Greek philosopher named Theophrastus—a pupil of Aristotle himself—wrote about the bananas that Alexander the Great and his men found when they got to India. In his botanical study, Theophrastus writes that this fruit:

•   [QE] “…is long and not straight, but crooked, and it is sweet to the taste.”

•   Since Theophrastus was writing in about 300 BCE or BC, we’re still talking over two thousand three hundred years ago or so.

•   [pause]

•   In other words, human beings and bananas go back a long, long time—

•   So maybe calling them “new” isn’t entirely accurate.

•   [pause]

•   On the other hand, they are surprisingly new to folks who live in colder places like Europe where annual freezes make growing banana plants impossible—except in a heated greenhouse.

•   That fact means that for something like 2,350 or so years of that 2,500-year span since people first wrote about bananas—these fruits didn’t frequently get to places with winters like Europe or North America.

•   For the vast majority of those two dozen centuries, then, the only colder-weather folks who were interested in bananas were philosophers like Theophrastus—or international travelers who went to warmer places—or to a few wacky people who were interested in botany.

•   In fact, if you look through the historical record, it almost seems as if Europeans kept forgetting that bananas existed—for centuries at a time.

•   Written records seem to pop up now and again, only to be followed by long periods in which no one seems to have written about them at all.

•   [pause]

•   But more sustained interest in bananas—at least among the kinds of folks who wrote things down—was reborn in Europe with the Renaissance—from about 1350–1600ish.

•   The Renaissance rekindled Europeans’ interest in the rest of the world—and their interest in ancient Greek texts—by folks who’d been dead for nearly 2,000 years—like Theophrastus.

•   For instance, here’s one Renaissance document from 1578—it’s Spanish-language book whose catchy title is:

•   [QE] Tractado De Las Drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales, con sus Plantas debujadas al vivo por Cristóbal Acosta—Médico y cirujano que las vio ocularmente.

•   If your 16th century Spanish happens to be a little rusty these days, it translates as:

•   [QE]Treatise on the drugs and medicines in the East Indies with its plants drawn live by Christóval Acosta, physician and surgeon who saw them with his own eyes.

•   In the book, there’s a chapter called:

•   “[QE] De la Higuera de las Indias” or, in English, “[QE] About The Indian fig tree.”

•   That chapter begins with a fascinating drawing of a tree-sized plant—that’s definitely not a fig tree—but is obviously a banana or plantain plant. That said, it’s also pretty abstract and stylized—maybe so as to illustrate the different parts of that plant.

•   It’s almost how you’d draw a banana plant if you were a geometry teacher trying to teach kids about parallel lines rectangles and cone-shaped things and you didn’t care if that’s exactly how the plant looked or not, you were just going to do it that way for crying out loud.

•   In that sense it’s not entirely unlike the famous drawing called Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci, famously another Renaissance guy.

•   I’ve put a copy of the illustration on to findyourselfinhistory.com if you’d like to take a look at this Vitruvian Banana plant.

•   Either way, the leaves alone make it clear that it’s not a fig tree. Fig leaves are pretty small; banana leaves are enormous.

•   Plus he says that in Guinea—in Western Africa—these fruiting figs are called bananas—though he also gives many other names for them, such as Cenorins, Cadelins, Chinacapanoes, and Inninga (74).

•   Doctor Acosta also writes about the reputed medical properties of this so-called Indian fig.

•   He’s actually much more modest in his claims than are many 21st century popup ad creators.

•   He asserts that physicians from the places where bananas grow, greatly praise the fruits for people with hot ailments and other sicknesses.

•   He says it’s used to treat cholera, to help with lung conditions because it generates phlegm, and for maladies of kidneys because it generates urine.

•   He makes no mention of how awesome they are when split open and served with ice cream and hot fudge.

•   [pause]

•   Despite that glaring omission, though, Spaniards like Acosta believed bananas worth bringing with them when they crossed the Atlantic and came as conquerors to the American hemisphere.

•   In fact, it was about a half century prior to Acosta’s book about bananas in Asia that the first bananas seem to have made it to the Caribbean.

•   There’s some speculation that bananas could have arrived in Chile by way of Polynesian sailors—who were remarkably effective at going to many, many other places—and who almost always brought bananas with them wherever they went.

•   But there is as of yet no conclusive evidence to this effect.

•   [pause]

•   On the other hand, many scholars credit a man named Tomás de Berlanga with planting the first bananas in the American hemisphere in 1516. He was a Dominican friar who eventually became Bishop of Panama and sought to develop Santo Domingo—today the capital city of the Dominican Republic.

•   [pause]

•   If that version of events is accurate, the process that Bishop Berlanga put into motion would lead to bananas becoming a staple food for people from all walks of life throughout the Caribbean Sea and all of the sub-Tropical and Tropical regions of the American hemisphere.

•   And it was in the Caribbean that bananas would begin their journey from regional specialty to global superfruit.

•   [separator music]

Bananas in the English-Speaking World

•   English- and French-speakers didn’t have much to add to the banana question until they began conquering Caribbean colonies of their own. 

•   That process didn’t begin until after 1627—more than a full century since Bishop Berlanga started planting bananas.

•   When they did encounter these unusual plant foods, French and English authors wrote about the fruits as if they were novelties—like they’re encountering them for the first time.

•   A book from 1658, written by a Huguenot minister—a French Calvinist Protestant—named Charles de Rochefort, mentions these curious plants in a book about the natural and moral history of the Caribbean. A few years later, an English author translated Rochefort’s book into his own language called

•   [QE] The History of the Caribby-Islands.

•   Observations in this book include such fun banana facts as this description of a banana plant:

•   [QE] “[T]heir stalks, which are of a green colour, shining,

•   spongious, and very full of water, shoot out of a great Onion”

•   Rochefort is referring to the large bulb of roots at the bottom of the plant that does, in fact, look sort of like a giant onion.

•   [pause]

•   He also points out that:

•   [QE] “Which way soever their fruit be cut when it is come to maturity, the meat of them which is white as snow represents in the middle the form of a Crucifix, especially when it is cut in thin slices. Hence the Spaniards are so superstitious as to think it a kind of mortal sin to use a knife about it, and are scandalized to see anything employed about it but the teeth.”

•   [pause]

•   I didn’t find any other confirmation of Rochefort’s observation about Spaniards refusing to cut bananas with knives.

•   But the claim brings up one of the strangest historical facts about bananas:

•   These innocent fruits become almost weaponized at different points in time as a way to belittle people who live in warmer climates.

•   [pause]

•   Many of these banana-related insults originate from past scholars. For example, the French scientist and natural philosopher named Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon who lived from 1707–1788, constructed multiple, overtly insulting arguments based on an idea that warm climates allegedly produce lazy, uncivilized people, who are incapable of controlling their passions.

•   By the 19th century, these ideas had seeped into popular mythology in the English-speaking world.

•   Take for instance, the following 422-page-long, 1829 London-based reference book about trees and fruits—part of a larger series called [QE] The Library of Entertaining Knowledge.

•   This volume argues that bananas are such good food products and so easy to grow, that they ruin the people of warm climates who live where these bounteous bananas blossom.

•   It claims that people who rely on bananas for their daily bread are doomed to live their lives in an uncivilized state.

•   Bananas are so plentiful, they’ll prevent people from developing a work ethic; they’ll become lazy and immoral.

•   The article asserts that the ease with which bananas can be grown and harvested:

•   “[QE] …has doubtless contributed to arrest the progress of improvement in tropical regions.”

•   The source further contends—without any proof or specific details—that any man who lives where bananas are grown just spends his time

•   “[QE] …gathering the fruit of his little patch of bananas, asking no greater luxuries, and proposing no higher ends of life than to eat and to sleep.”

•   The author continues in a matter-of-fact tone:

•   “[QE] …the idleness of the poor Indian keeps him where he has been for ages, little elevated above the inferior animal”

•   [pause]

•   That vicious argument, once again, appearing here in a general reference article—about fruit.

•   This author never clarifies which specific people are being referenced—and ignores the fact that there are many, many so-called Indians who live in climates that are similar to Europe, or even colder.

•   Nevertheless, the writer triumphantly declares the superiority of people from Europe—like the author—as if it were a mathematical fact:

•    “[QE] …the industry of the European, under his colder skies, and with a less fertile soil, has surrounded him with all the blessings of society—its comforts, its affections, its virtues, and its intellectual riches.”

•   This case of what seems to me to be obvious, overt, unexamined prejudice, masquerading as factual knowledge—is a good illustration of why real researchers and real students of history do not and cannot take everything that’s written down at face value.

•   [pause]

•   But we still need to wrestle with and interpret this kind of documentary evidence.

•   The fact is: these ideas were extremely common throughout written documents from nineteenth century and what makes them so insidious is that they show up in unlikely places that, like this banana article, aren’t even supposed to be about people.

•   Meanwhile, these arguments imply that making bananas readily available should be a major threat to civilization as we know it.

•   [pause]

•   Except that just a couple of decades after this article is published, British and U.S. entrepreneurs, began a concerted effort to make bananas easily available—in abundance—to their own populations.

•   Once those bananas started to become popular, Europeans and North Americans stopped writing about the grave threat posed by this corrupting fruit.

•   [long pause]

•   I’m looking on my computer screen at a digital copy of a  New York Times article from April, 1852. The headline simply reads “West Indies”—the article’s a bunch of short, assorted news updates coming from newspapers in the British-controlled colonies in the Caribbean—that is, the British West Indies.

•   Buried about halfway through this article is a short paragraph talking about recent news from Demerara, a district in what was then the British colony of British Guiana; that’s today’s country of Guyana on the northern coast of South America.

•   Quoting a colonial Guianese newspaper, the Times article reads:

•   “[QE] [A] gentleman in that colony had dried the banana and produced an article superior to prunes in taste, color and flavor… 

•   Whoa. Superior to prunes you say? I excitedly read on.

•   Yes, you heard that right—dried banana. Banana-jerky. [long pause] Banaisins.

•   Wait: Why would anyone in their right mind dehydrate bananas?

•   As it turns out, before climate controlled shipping technologies, tropical fruits spoiled very quickly in the cargo holds of ships.

•   In the 1850s ships were slow even by later 19th century standards.

•   To get from British Guiana to England on 1852’s fastest merchant ships could still take a couple of months. Even to get across the Caribbean from British Guiana to northern ports in the United States could take weeks. By the time your ship full of un-dehydrated bananas arrives, you’d have a cargo hold full of fruit-fly-swarms and moldy banana mush instead the golden, crescent-shaped deliciousness you’d intended to sell.

•   But a number of forces began to come together in the late 1860s and beyond. These factors would change the nature of breakfast forever—and also the world.

•   The quick run-down of these convergent historical happenings goes like this. Hang on, because it’s at least ten concurrent things: Ready?

1.    Industrialization: Business people in Britain, France, Germany, the US, Japan, and some other places too, built more factories and mass-produced more products than ever inside them.

2.    Urbanization: Lots of people came to work in those factories from farming areas, leading to fast growth of cities all over the US and the rest of the industrialized world

3.    Creation of trusts Some industrialists tried to corner their markets to dominate their industries. They eventually created what we call ‘trusts’—monopolies on many different goods and services like oil, railroads, even food products like canned meat and, as we’ll see in a bit, tropical fruits too.

4.    Push to find new raw materials: Factory owners, and the governments that supported them, became increasingly interested in other parts of the world for raw materials—especially the tropics.

5.    More inventing: Science and technology became increasingly important for those factory owners . Inventors became celebrities in this new era. 

6.    Increased interest in tropical plants: Joining in the tech-nerd-dom, botanists and chemists became even more interested in the properties of natural products from around the globe.

7.    New military technologies: Chemists learned new ways to blow things up, leading to fast-paced military innovations.

8.    New transportation & communication technologies: Steamships, trains, telegraphs and eventually cars, planes, telephones and radios—all sped up connections between people.

9.    Empire-Building: Bigger, faster steamships, in addition to new ways to blow things, up led to gunships and other related technologies. Those led to military muscle-flexing empire-building around the globe.

AND FINALLY,

10. Consumer interest in tropical products. Consumers in cities encountered delicious tropical products like bananas, pineapples, and oranges. Demand for these products rose along with a desire for other equally exciting plant-based products. 

•   From Asian opium, chemists synthesized morphine and heroin; from Andean coca leaves they synthesized cocaine—these drugs all flooded into the U.S. and other industrial countries mentioned above.

•   That’s ten huge historical trends, all happening in the same span of decades from the 1870s through the 1910s and beyond.

•   I’ll list these on Findyourselfinhistory.com if you missed one or, say, ten of them.

•   These ten things didn’t all happen at once, but they reinforced one another and led to all kinds of big consequences, including—for the first time—the availability of tropical products in surprising places.

•   I’m now looking at a second New York Times article—this one’s from 1865—just a dozen years after that British gentleman had proposed his clever plan to sell prune-nanas.

•   This headline reads “…The Tropical Fruit Trade: Where Bananas, Pineapples and Oranges Come From”

•   It begins by describing what had recently become normal for 1865 New York City—detailing how many Times readers have seen impromptu fruit stands set up at the Fulton Ferry dock. But it also explains how most people don’t know where the fruit even comes from.

•   It reports that the boats that bring in these new fruits are mostly British vessels and “not at all regular traders” and that “It is astonishing how much waste ensues from the fruit decaying while in transit for this port, whole cargoes sometimes being lost….”

•   In the very next year, another New York Times piece demonstrates that the fruit trade had ramped up.

•   This 1866 article begins: “The market is now glutted with tropical fruits of all kinds…” and explains that there are now two “large markets lying upon the river” that sell so-called “foreign fruits.”

•   After describing all of the pineapples, bananas, oranges and lemons chaotically sold the marketplaces, the reporter adds:

•   “The amount of money invested in this trade is immense, yet it is carried on in such a loose, detached manner as almost to preclude the possibility of arriving at any satisfactory statistics in reference to it. The men engaged in the business are not of the class one would suspect of conducting great enterprises, or of directing capital to successful results….”

•   The Times speaks a bit about the variety of dealers of these fruits as well as their extremely high prices.

•   Merchants in 1866 bought a single bunch of bananas for about fifty cents—the equivalent of about eight dollars today.

•   Those bananas sold in New York City for one to two dollars per bunch—something between $16 and $32 in today’s prices.

•   Bananas were high-end luxury goods.

•   And just like consumers of some present-day luxury goods sold on the streets of New York, banana buyers needed to beware too. 

•   The article ends with a warning:

•   “It is never safe to buy fruit of the street peddlers. They are apt to lie around the docks and pick from the refuse such fruit as is but slightly tainted, or to purchase for a minimal price that which is verging on decay, and by mixing with wholesome-looking fruit dispose of the whole.”

•   In other words, just like bogus Rolex watches and Gucci bags, 1866 witnessed scammers on the street trying to pass off counterfeit bananas as the real deal.

•   [pause]

•   The Times article leaves us with a clear image of a truly chaotic tropical fruit trade; The whole industry seems to have been improvised, decentralized, unpredictable and messy, with little quality control and abundant scammers chewing around the edges of the trade.

•   That picture would soon change.

•   About a decade after the haphazard mayhem described in 1866 New York, all the ingredients for a new tropical fruit monopoly, came together in the giant fruit bowl of history.

•   [separator music]

United Fruit

•   In the 1870s and beyond, multiple U.S. entrepreneurs assembled fleets of faster-than-ever steamships, pushing out competitors with slower vessels. 

•   These enterprises took advantage of unequal land distribution that had long plagued the peoples of Central America and the Caribbean. Working with local elites in those countries, they bought up agricultural lands. 

•   Increasingly aggressive U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean and Central America supported this trend, rewarding pro-business governments—including some brutal dictatorships—and acting threateningly toward those who wouldn’t play ball.

•   In this way, U.S. politicians, military strategists, and new trust-building entrepreneurs, brought the United States into the co-called Second Age of Imperialism.

•   That age of expansion had already begun across the ocean. European countries asserted their dominance, establishing colonies—so-called protectorates—first in India and China in the middle of the 19th-century. 

•   Decades later, following a conference in Berlin in 1885, representatives from multiple Western European governments agreed on new rules for dividing up the continent of Africa amongst themselves.

•   By 1914, almost the entire continent of Africa—with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia—had been taken over by European colonizers.

•   As the late 19th century progressed, U.S. policy in Central America and the Caribbean reflected this same combination of military and political expansion.

•   The record is not subtle. Between 1898–1945 alone, Washington would intervene militarily and economically multiple times in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua;

•   The U.S. would militarily support rebellious Panamanians’ secession from Colombia in 1903; it engaged in a military occupation in Cuba first in 1898–1902, then 1906–1909, again in 1912, and one more time in 1922. 

•   Without asking Puerto Ricans, the island became a U.S. territory in 1898, and still is part of the U.S. today.

•   Each of these interventions is a different story and each involved at least some leaders and sectors of the population in those countries who either openly favored U.S. involvement or tacitly supported it.

•   But there’s no question that the so-called “Gunboat Diplomacy” of this period allowed U.S. political, economic and military interests to dominate the Caribbean sea and surrounding countries.

•   In that atmosphere, U.S. fruit companies took advantage and became part of this increasing dominance. Their story closely resembles those of the other monopolies or trusts from this era. In the 1870s & 1880s, the most efficiently run, best-equipped, or richest fruit-growing, fruit-transporting, and fruit-selling companies pushed smaller, more disorganized firms out of business.

•   By 1899 all the biggest companies merged into a single, enormous trust called the United Fruit Company. That company’s influence would shape many Central American and Caribbean countries.  In multiple cases, the company supported dictators who granted the fruit company special legal and tax exemptions to operate. That dynamic would eventually lead to political and labor unrest, followed by government oppression of labor organizers and suppression of popular political movements.

•   Yet United Fruit’s own marketing campaign offers a different version of the company’s role in the region. In 1922 the company printed a booklet called The Story of the Banana—which you can find and read for free on Google Books. It describes the many gifts that the banana industry brought to the countries under its influence.

•   “The United Fruit Company has expended over $200,000,000 toward the development of the Latin-American countries where it does business, and has been, and is, a most potent factor in the extensive commercial relations of the United States with those countries.”

•   Yet much of this little book is not just about the company’s self-reported benevolence; it’s also about how enormous and powerful and diversified this business juggernaut had become since its origins in the 1870s.

•   They boast of having shipped 230 million bunches of bananas to the U.S. alone; owning 1.5 million acres of land in Central America and the Caribbean; operating 1,200 miles of railroad, 3,500 miles of telephone & telegraph cable; installing electricity, public lighting and sewage facility.

•   They report not only having built hospitals and water treatment facilities, but also a large fleet of ships to carry not only bananas but also passengers—some in luxury accommodations—throughout the Caribbean basin.

•   They called it “The Great White Fleet.”

•   United Fruit also took new refrigeration technologies that were transforming the meat industry and created refrigerated cargo ships that could carry its cargoes further without nearly as much spoilage.

•   From U.S. coastal ports, it distributed bananas, sugar, cocoa, coconuts and citrus fruits by rail throughout the interior of the United States.

•   People living in landlocked states whose parents’ generation never could have imagined that they would ever taste a banana—who had only heard about these strange luxury foods by reading about them—could now slice them up and put them in their cereal.

•   [pause]

•   And this entire, enormous enterprise with its tentacles in almost every imaginable facet related to tropical agriculture, transportation, and sale—which played an outsized role in the politics, economics, and even military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean—all that came about by turning what had been a weird, curvy yellow fruit into something normal—something we all of us weirdos take for granted today.

•   [separator music]

Conclusion

•   So bananas have been cultivated in the warm parts of the Old world since seriously ancient times. And they’ve been in the American hemisphere for about five centuries. Which isn’t ancient, but it’s probably not fair to call it recent.

•   But bananas are brand-new to colder parts of the globe.

•   How new? Put it this way:

•   If you had a banana cream pie that represented all of recorded history in which some people ate bananas, 

•   And you got the slice that represented just the bit in which people in cold places could eat them, you’d end up with only a paper-thin slice of pie.

•   And you’d yell at your aunt Linda for being so stingy with the dessert and then drive off to your closest Transcontinental House of Waffles and get yourself a proper slice of that creamy, banana-infused ambrosia.

•   [pause]

•   The point is that bananas are only recently a globally available product—only since the late part of the 19th century.

•   And it took a complex pudding of interconnected factors to make them that way.

•   Stranger still, some of those factors seem at first to be completely unrelated to fruit—military expansionism, giant industrial monopolies, factory-based economics—none of which obviously seems to have anything to do with bananas.

•   [pause]

•   Until you start to unpeel these seemingly separate factors.

•   [pause]

•   At that point, you realize that they all formed part of an intertwined system that impacted our world—and still impacts it—in all kinds of surprising ways.

•   Without understanding the long, slightly curvy path that is the history of the banana, you don’t realize just how starkly different we are from what had come before.

•   You need temporal landmarks in order to understand just how recent—and bizarre—our present-day, fruit-filled world can be.

Teaser

•   In our next episode: Who’s your daddy?—

•   …used to determine who you are. In most places and times in the past, whether you were allowed to legally speak in public—or wear certain clothing—or eat certain foods—or do say, read, or even think out loud about all kinds of things—depended on who your parents were.

•   A world in which your prestige and your birth-status determine who you are is what’s called a society of orders—

•   But as a person of the present, You Are Disorderly.

•   Stay tuned.

Outgoing credits

•   [Vamp]

•   You can find references to the historical sources, audio clips, and other awesome things used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   Special thanks to my colleague at Maryville College Andrew Irvine for providing me with an authentic Aussie voice for one of my popup ads.

•   I obviously work at a cool place: Maryville College. In the Great Smoky Mountains. Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

•   [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or people who accidentally wandered on to campus looking for the nearest Transcontinental House of Waffles so they could buy a slice of banana cream pie.

•   This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

•   Thanks for listening.

•   [Fade out.]