This is tragic. Uganda – the world’s top banana consuming nation (with an average intake of about 500 pounds per person, compared to about 25 pounds for the typical U.S. consumers) – finds dozens of ways to use the fruit. That includes the national dish, a sort of mush called matooke, along with banana beer and a banana spirit – that’s the gin in question – called waragi. Last week, 80 people died after consuming a home-distilled batch of the drink that was, apparently, laced with methanol. Many suffered blindness and kidney failure before they actually succumbed.

Tragic, as I said, so I hope you won’t see this video – which I made in the Democratic Republic of Congo after my first taste of waragi – makes light of the situation. Even bottled and (assumedly) pure, the stuff isn’t so great, though my review was a little more kind…

Still the best banana picture ever.

I met Ken “Bananaster” Banister about six years ago, when I was beginning to research my book. At that point, his museum occupied a storefront in Altadena, California (a suburb of Los Angeles.) He’d been running the museum for decades, and it was the most amazing repository of banana items I’d ever seen. But Ken was retiring, and was trying to sell the place. At that point, he was asking several hundred thousand dollars for the facility; an eBay auction resulted in no takers.
A couple of years later, with the future of the museum in jeopardy, he moved it to an exhibition center provided by the city of Hesperia – a high-desert town between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All seemed well when I visited in 2008. But earlier this year, Hesperia told Ken that his collection – now reduced – could no longer be accommodated. The search for a new home was on, again. Last week, that home was found: Virginia Garbutt, who owns a liquor store near Salton Sea – a dry lake bed and former resort area south of Palm Springs – picked up the collection, and hopes it will be a tourist attraction.

I hope so too, and I’m optimistic. I also hope that the new owners will maintain Ken’s sunny and wacky demeanor. Sunny, as in “a banana looks like a smile”  (he told me that when I first met him) and wacky, as in the picture below.

CNN did a comprehensive report on the saga; the picture illustrating the story is from my collection.

Here’s an account of my visit to the Hesperia museum.

Here’s a chapter from my book that didn’t make the final cut about Ken and his museum.

Not the Trader Joe's price.

First up, the above fruit, at five for 5.00. That’s not per kilo, that’s per fruit. With the Aussie dollar trading about even with U.S. currency, that’s the A NEW RECORD for fruit sold at a standard market – over $10USD per pound, and that’s a “special.” (Maybe my math is wrong. Let me know; I’m comparing at six ounces per fruit.) Compare that to Trader Joe’s, in the U.S., which sells bananas – imported from Latin America – five for a single buck.

A little better?

These go for $3.49 per kilo, or $1.58 per pound. Using the standard index of six ounces per fruit, that’s a pricey 59 cents per. Ouch.

More like it, but still…

This bunch, at the equivalent of 90 cents per pound U.S., was at Aldi, which bills itself as “Australia’s Cheapest Supermarket.” But even that’s a high price; no major U.S. supermarket chain that I know of charges more than 79 cents.

ANALYSIS: So, why the premium? One would think that since these are local fruit, prices would be much lower. Not so, for two reasons.  Australia is a first-world country, which means that banana workers there are paid a living wage. That’s different than the U.S. system of banana economics, which still relies on exploitative labor arrangements in Latin America, source of all our fruit. Second, Australia isn’t looking at the Panama Disease scourge that threatens to wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop; it is fighting the disease now, with less-than-encouraging results (at least in the field. In the lab, things may be better. See my Australia page for related posts.) Supply and demand affects banana prices everywhere, as I wrote last year in the New York Times. Our future probably involves higher prices, because of banana disease, but it also isn’t crazy to wonder why third-world workers shouldn’t be paid a wage that would give them the same kind of economic status as Aussie banana laborers. But they’re not, and they suffer because of it – and because we insist on banana with record-shattering low prices, like these I recently saw on a Los Angeles street corner.

Under the Manhattan Bridge, a special banana. © 2010, Dan Koeppel

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 to do anything but exploit workers and land – it would be too expensive to do otherwise. The banana industry, however, refuses to budge from the monoculture, for the most part, saying it is impossible to import any other variety in bulk.

But that’s exactly what is being done in so-called ethnic markets. Here’s a shot I took last month of an alternate variety, commonly known as “apple” bananas, being sold under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown.

What does this mean? The fruit comes from Del Monte, one of the world’s largest banana importers (though it isn’t a major presence in the U.S.) I’d ask the question: does “impossible” mean that systems really can’t be developed, or that the major banana outfits – Dole and Chiquita – are simply afraid (or lack the creativity) to run their banana business as anything but the boring, exploitative, and doomed entity of the past century?

By the way, those under-the-bridge fruit are amazingly good. Try one – let it ripen to a rather brown, speckled state, a little more than you might for a conventional banana – and you’ll be rewarded with complex flavor, creamy texture, and pure fruit satisfaction.

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 name: The “Banana Splitter,” from Book of Joe.

A banana saver. From Organize.com.)

A banana ripening bag, from Lakeland kitchen supplies, U.K.

A banana “sheath.” Grotesque, from the Museum of Modern Art store, NYC.

"El Presidente." Image from Allan Sanders "Loopland." (Click to check out his gorgeous illustration portfolio.)

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 did the company enjoy enormous privileges in that region, but also counted on authoritarian governments in dealing with labor unrest. The literature assumes that United Fruit and the dictators were natural allies due to their opposition to organized unionism. This paper shows that this alliance could only survive as long as the multinational provided the dictators with economic stability for the country. However, when the multinational proved to be incapable of doing that, the dictators allied with the working class to confront the multinational and extract higher rents from it.”

Bucheli is one of the most respected and thoughtful banana scholars out there. His work was primary source material for my book. You can read the whole paper (PDF download) here. (Thanks to Steven Kinzer, another primary source, for the link.)

These are the campaign’s “Six Things You Can Do” to help make the changes that just about anyone who knows banana history need to happen:

1. Sign a petition, here.

2. Write or call Dole and Chiquita’s (Chiquita doesn’t provide a email but you can write them on here) Corporate Social Responsibility Departments and ask them to make meaningful compensation to the victims of AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) violence in the banana lands and improve their labor relations. For US citizens: Write your congressperson and Senator. There is already an investigation by Congressman Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts. being pursued in relation to Colombian paramilitary payments made by U.S. companies. However, more pressure is needed if we want to see results. Apathy gets us nowhere, only by demanding action from your government and expressing your disdain for what Dole and Chiquita have engaged in will your government see the value in pursuing this issue. You pay their salaries through your taxes, PUT THEM TO WORK!

CSR Department for Dole:
dole_consumercenter@na.dole.com
Sylvain Cuperlier
Vice President – Director of Worldwide Corporate Social Responsibility
Dole Food Company, Inc.
+33 (0) 1 44 17 30 60

CSR Department for Chiquita:
http://www.chiquitabrands.com/CompanyInfo/ContactUs.aspx
Corporate Headquarters:
Chiquita Brands International, Inc.
250 East Fifth Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202 USA
+513-784-8000

Write Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt and let him know you think it’s important that he continue his investigation into this issue:
William.Delahunt@mail.house.gov
Washington, DC
2454 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-3111
Fax: 202-225-5658

South Shore Office
1250 Hancock Street
Suite 802-N
Quincy, MA 02169
617-770-3700
Toll-Free: 800-794-9911
Fax: 617-770-2984

Cape and Islands Office
146 Main Street
Hyannis, MA 02601
508-771-0666
Toll-Free: 800-870-2626
Fax: 508-790-1959

3. Travel directly to the affected areas in Colombia. Witness For Peace and other groups are beginning delegations to the banana zone. Here you can see first hand what has occurred and work with local experts on coming up with solutions for the affected communities. For more information visit the Witness For Peace Delegations to Colombia website.

4. Volunteer for the campaign and use your talents to help bring a solution for the affected workers and families. We have space for generalists and specialists in tech, public relations, research, outreach, education, networking and more. Are you an artist? Create a piece related to this issue and we will feature it on our website. Only with a dedicated network of volunteers can we make this campaign a success. Contact Brenna McLaughlin at bl.campaign@gmail.com for more info.

5. Support La Isla Foundation through a donation. La Isla Foundation is coordinating the campaign and needs your support. If you don’t have money but have time you can organize a fundraising event for the campaign and the affected communities. No donation is too small, the key to success is broad based support. Contact Jason Glaser at laislafoundation@gmail.com to donate or organize an event. Soon you will also be able to donate directly at: bananalandcampaign.org

6. Eat locally as much as possible. It’s nutritious, it can be a lot of fun, it’s great for getting to know your area and community better and it takes the demand away from industrialized food and the nasty consequences it brings. (Note from Dan: Not so sure on this one, but…)

The campaign will be kicking off December 6, 2009, with a party/premiere at The Harlem School of the Arts in New York City. Open bar, music, and speakers (including me; my talk will almost certainly be made more fascinating by the free drinks.) I’ll have some comments on the campaign’s goals after the event. I hope to meet you there.

Link: Banana Land Campaign website; press release; Facebook group.

Image from USA Today.

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 idea of bagging and boxing a potential replacement fruit – the Cavendish – in order to allow it to survive the long trip from the tropics to our stores. The plan worked, and the banana industry was saved.

Today, as disease ravages the global Cavendish crop, packing and shipping technologies are once again becoming key to replacing the commercial fruit. At the same time, bananas compete more and more with candy and other junk food at convenience stores, where branding and presentation beyond an oval sticker might be a plus (at least in terms of marketing.)

Del Monte and 7-Eleven seem to believe just that and have begun, at about 30 stores near the convenience store giant’s Dallas headquarters, a small retail test of bagged and branded bananas. The packaging is designed to extend the shelf-life of the fruit from two to five days. (I’m not sure how the convenience store chain came up with those timeframes, actually. Bananas should be able to stay on sale for more than 48 hours if handled properly.) “Our customers want yellow bananas — not brown,” Joseph DePinto, CEO of the convenience chain, told USA Today. (I’ve written about convenience store fruit before. It hasn’t really worked out that well for the big banana companies.)

Since I’m not in Texas, I haven’t handled the packaging, but from the picture, it looks a lot like something a high-end produce distributor called Melissa’s uses for plantain sold in California supermarkets; Chiquita also made a try with a similar form of packaging a few years ago. It used a membrane-like coating and a special device that separated the fruit; the system was designed by a Boston consultancy called Gen3 Partners; you can read about the product here.

In a published case study, Gen3 quotes Chiquita as saying: “We have been in business for over one hundred years. We need to shake up our markets with new innovation.” Environmentalists rightly see this kind of innovation as problematic, and I agree,  but with mixed feelings. I’d be happy if the new wrappers somehow made the fruit a more likely buy – over junk food – at convenience stores.

The bigger issue is that new production technology is desperately needed in the banana world – though not necessarily to make the fruit a convenience store favorite.  The fruit industry continues to rely on Cavendish, and only Cavendish. That fruit is doomed (read my book or see this article), and no amount of packaging can change that. But in order to save bananas as a consumer product, the industry will need to develop new technologies to deliver new bananas to consumers – just as Dole did fifty years ago, and tougher, ripeness-delaying packaging will be a part of that. Is this particular experiment a step in the right direction? Not sure – but it is a step.