Dan Koeppel's Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted; lots of travel. I’m in Sydney, Australia right now, and I’m surprised at the wide variety of banana prices here. Australia is a major banana-growing nation, so it doesn’t need to import (though banana disease might change that.) In a one-hour walk through town, I saw some pretty [...]

The corporate banana monoculture, based on the Cavendish variety – which accounts for 99% of the world’s export crop – is both doomed and dangerous. Diseases are striking the world crop, forcing increased used of pesticides (when the diseases are curable, which isn’t always the case.) Reliance on a single, commodity fruit makes it impossible [...]

I’m ashamed.
Boing Boing is my favorite website. The editors there are constantly scooping me on banana gadgets, and this reflects poorly on me. So, this year’s banana holiday gift guide is (apologetically) shoplifted  from a bunch of posts BB ran earlier this month, and which it rightfully applied the “awesome” tag to.

A banana peeler. Official [...]

The Effie-Mohawk Stairway has been reopened, and the illegally-placed gates that were put up there over this past Thanksgiving weekend have been taken down.
Sort of.
My friends and stair-climbing partners Andrew Lichtman and Ying Chen were the first to report this, and sent these pix (click to enlarge.)
In the tradition of not being overly thankful for [...]

Marcelo Bucheli – of the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign College of Business – published a fascinating paper on the relationship between the United Fruit company (Chiquita) and Latin American dictatorships. Here’s the abstract:
“The US multinational United Fruit Company has been considered the quintessential representative of American imperialism in Central America. Not only [...]

QUICK SUMMARY: a new gate has been put up – illegally – on one of Echo Park’s historic stairways. Read the full report, below, to find out what you can do about it.
Friday, November 27. Working on new stairway routes with a bunch of friends; we take a late-afternoon walk that mainly runs north and [...]

For decades, there have been calls for justice on the industrial plantations – and in the nations that support them – for banana workers. Progress has been spotty, at best, mostly because of a disconnect between those laborers and consumers of the world’s most popular fruit. The Banana Land Campaign is a new effort to [...]

13 miles, Shrine Auditorium to Venice, party afterward – Saturday, Nov. 21.
Learn more: The Great Los Angeles Walk: The Great Los Angeles Walk 2009 is Tomorrow!.
Planning to use mass transit? Here’s an info packet I made (PDF file, password for downloading is “glaw”.

I would.

As I’ve said before, the best thing the banana companies do is position their product as an alternative to salty snacks and candy. In this ad, from The New York Daily News (Oct. 23, 2009) the fruit also takes on pricier energy bars. A smart move that also notches prices up – at an [...]