My banana piece in “The Scientist.”
Normally, you have to be a paid subscriber to read it. Free access here, at least for a while.
January, 2009
18
Jan 09
Conglolese Rebel Leader and the Deadliest Banana Disease (Updated)
I just got back from a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I was on assignment for National Geographic. More on that in the coming weeks. We were in the central part of the country. Eastern Congo – along the borders of Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda – has been locked in fighting for years now, and the battles have ratcheted up since last August, resulting in a huge humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people being forced into refugee camps, along with thousands of deaths.
The region is where people depend on bananas as part of their diet more than anywhere else in the world, and the fruit there is being attacked by what is probably the most virulent banana disease: a fungus bacterium called Xanthomonas wilt. Its spread can be slowed through clean-farming techniques – making sure tools and clothing are kept free of dirt as they move from village to village – and there have been extensive informational campaigns designed to carry this information to local families, who would face starvation if the disease hit their crops.
The image above is of Laurent Nkunda, the leader of the Congolese rebels. It appeared last year in the pages of a magazine called Jeune Afrique (Young Africa). He’s vowing that he will take his forces all the way to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. His fortunes have since changed, but the disease hasn’t – and the poster behind him, which advertises how to stop it, will probably outlast his reign.
Update: Nkunda’s reign is over. He was arrested yesterday in Rwanda, his former state sponsor. The Guardian has a good piece on it.
12
Jan 09
Chiquita’s Pricey Belgian Airport Fruit – The Banana’s Future as a Snack Food?
That’s two bucks a pop. And they’re selling.
An interesting Chiquita experiment at Belgium’s Brussels National airport – appropriate, since the transportation hub is just a fifteen-minute, one-stop train ride from the global banana bank at the Catholic University of Leuven, where over 1,400 varieties of the fruit are preserved for scientific experimentation and against future ecosystem loss (if only the banana companies would contribute a bit to the funding of the bank!)
At the top is the “Chiquita Banana on the Go” product. This is a somewhat different take on the single-sale banana than the not-quite-successful convenience store version (below.) Note the bar code and the per-fruit branding – the fruit we see at our U.S. 7Eleven stores is sometimes sold in banana-logo cartons, but aren’t individually labeled. Also interesting: the Belgian airport bananas sat right next to bowls of apples and oranges, which weren’t branded. After more than a century, the banana is pretty much the only fruit that takes to this kind of labeling.
Note the bar codes: perfect for the banana as a “packaged good,” rather than a plain-old item of produce. Packaged goods, of course, cost more.
Analysis: does the branding make a difference in this retail venue? The fascinating thing here is that Chiquita is using its brand-name for the opposite purpose in the airport than it does in supermarkets. Sold at grocery stores, the banana is a commodity – cheaper than apples and oranges. The logo serves as a gentle incentive toward consumer choice: “pick me,” it says, “over other bananas,” even though they’re all the same. But in the airport, Chiquita is positioning its fruit as a luxury good – something with more value than the plainly-presented competition. Does it work? The worker at the café told me that the bananas still sold at twice the rate of the apples and oranges, despite – in this case – also costing twice as much (and that’s a lot: €1.50 is about two bucks these days – enough to buy four pounds, or up to 12 bananas, in some parts of the U.S.!)
Final point: This reflects the changing role of the fruit in our culture. Less and less is it competing with other produce – and more and more with snacks like candy and chips. That’s a good thing in terms of public health – and probably for the banana companies, too, which, if the transformation continues, will ultimately be able to charge a lot more for fruit sold by the piece, rather than by the pound. Still, at this point, it seems the Euros are more willing to swallow the banana as a snack-food substitute than we in the U.S…
4
Jan 09
Mega-bargain Bananas – at a Gas Station?
Saw these in late December off Interstate 93 at a Circle K in Plymouth, New Hampshire. What a deal! But does that mean banana prices overall are dropping? Nope – they’re still all over the map. Here in Los Angeles, my local market is selling them for the oddball price of 77 cents a pound.
Mobile Blogging from here.
1
Jan 09
Why Read About Bananas?
THE FRUIT IS IN CRISIS. A killer disease has spread across half the planet, threatening to wipe out the fruit that we eat. At the same time, varieties of bananas that millions – across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific – depend upon as part of their daily diet are also menaced. Why? Because the world’s oldest, most popular fruit is a singularly weak, singularly odd organism. What’s being done? The biggest banana companies have said little and acted less. In labs across the world, however, scientists are racing to find new ways to breed the fruit, to make it stronger – even as their counterparts comb the planet’s most remote jungles and forests, searching for hidden and unknown varieties, one of which might hold the key to saving our – and the world’s – favorite fruit.
That’s what my book is about. And this blog. Plus pudding recipes.
