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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The reason we have only one kind of banana – out of the 1,000+ found worldwide – is partly an issue of transportation: every banana type ripens differently and has widely varying levels of fragility. In the 1950s, when the “original” commercial banana, the Gros Michel, was going functionally extinct, Dole came up with the [...]

Here’s panel one of Josh Kramer’s funny cartoon. Follow the link for more.

Fake Banana | Significant Objects ; tip from the fabulous Siel at GreenLAGirl…

PLUS: See the film in New York Wednesday, October 21, at 7:15 PM. Details here.

After pressure from the Swedish government  - efforts to boycott the banana company were underway, with a strong chance they would spread to other EU nations – Dole dropped a lawsuit it had filed against Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and [...]

You’ll have to go to the U.K., but there’s apparently a banana price war happening – the ASDA supermarket chain has been cutting prices on the fruit for weeks now. Currently, the fruit runs at 38 pence per kilo, which comes out to about 30 cents (U.S.) per pound. That’s the lowest I’ve ever seen [...]