EVIDENCE: Qantas passenger Toni Rogers found this non-Aussie sticker on her in-flight banana. Image: Cairns Post.
Australia and the Philippines both have banana problems: Panama Disease, the wilt that threatens the world’s commercial banana crop, is present in both places. Australia’s banana industry is reeling from the malady, which it is attempting – with little success – to contain by quarantining infected plantations.
The controversy began two weeks ago, when a passenger on a flight from New Zealand noticed that the Cavendish banana she was served bore a Philippine sticker. Within days, Australian banana growers and politicians were demanding Qantas stop serving non-native fruit – both as an issue of national pride and to protect the country’s banana crop. At first, the airline resisted, but last week, it gave in.
So, is this “threat” for real? Panama Disease is easy to spread. A little bit of dirt could conceivably
begin a chain of infection for a continent. But there’s not much dirt on a washed, picked banana that comes to an airport caterer from a wholesale grocer, as the fruit served aboard Qantas at either end of its flights does. Randy Ploetz, one of the top researchers in Panama Disease – he identified the strain that is currently spreading worldwide – says that “the probability of this being a problem seems pretty remote. I’d see this mainly as a symbolic gesture in support of their ongoing campaign.”
I agree – though I’m not sure what the symbolism represents to dismayed Philippine growers, or to passengers on inbound Qantas flights who now have to satisfy themselves with peanuts.
This is a demonstrator project created by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa. I love the idea, because it really does capture what a banana skin is. The colors, shape, and texture are perfect.
Here’s Fukasawa’s design for a strawberry juice box:
Here’s a second version, with a similar design. This one is actually on the market in Japan, I’m told, which is why it is less clean: the package needed information on it.
Less clean, but still lovely compared to some of our stateside juice packaging horrors:
Banana pudding, reviewed on video by people with way too much time on their hands. “People,” of course, meaning me.
If there were any place on earth I would rather live than sunny Los Angeles, it would the Kozy Shack. In this magical locale, the world’s most delicious dessert treats are made: they’re all-natural, always fresh and creamy, and available in at your friendly local grocery store.
The Kozy Shack company is based in Hicksville, Long Island, New York – just a few miles from where I grew up – and I’ve been eating gorging myself on their products since I was a kid. The company’s trio of rice puddings – original, cinnamon-raisin, and the richer, more vanilla-y European-style – are the supermarket category’s equivalent to Haagen Dazs ice cream. They put the crap that Jell-O foists on the American public to shame (the General Foods subsidiary recently dropped an ad circular in my mailbox that described its product as “contemporary.” Creepy.)
Kozy Shack has been expanding lately. Seasonal flavors like pumpkin and peach have been added. My vegan friends love the company’s soy-based products. On the other hand, I don’t know what to make of the “probiotic” SimplyWell brand extension, which features flavors like Green Tea and Lemon Chai.
I know this blog is supposed to be about bananas, but to my most-beloved dudes at Kozy: Probiotic? Why are you stooping to the level of yogurt? You’re better than that, and you know it. I’m also suspicious of some of the other products recently released under the Kozy Shack label – a line of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, and frozen desserts like tiramisu cups and eclairs. Here’s the problem: the rice pudding bar set by the original Kozy line reaches celestial heights. Unless those other products come close – very close – they’re going to be disappointing to consumers, and will make the whole Shack a less appealing piece of culinary real estate.
That applies even to other pudding varieties, which brings us to bananas. Kozy Shack’s earlier foray into the minefield of banana pudding – I call it that because the treat is so good when it is good, and so awful when it isn’t - was a disastrous recreation of a New Orleans staple called Bananas Foster. The real thing features about forty pounds of butter per serving, along with a pirate schooner’s worth of rum and sugar, mixed with bananas and banana liqueur, set on fire, and poured over vanilla ice cream. Trying to capture this in a hooch-and-fire free plastic supermarket cup was a singularly bad idea.
This time around, the pudding experts from Strong Island have kept it simpler. Good idea. But the results are still less-than-perfect. The ingredients list serves as the first warning: there are “natural flavors,” but bananas themselves are never mentioned. The product is all-natural, which is good, but the taste just isn’t right. See the attached video report, which includes my girlfriend’s off-camera opinion. She is a pudding expert and you can absolutely trust her.
Bummer. I was rooting for this one. But still, the company is doing incredible things with two of the world’s other staple foods: the sublime rice varieties, and the equally splendid tapioca (aka manioc, aka casava, aka yuca, and more than a dozen other names worldwide) rocks, as well. So all is forgiven – and I encourage a third try. Hint: real bananas, possibly in chunks (tough to do, I know, given the fruit’s perishability.) And it needs to be much, much creamier. The current version is way too gel-like.
Oh, and there’s definitely one Kozy marketing move that I absolutely buy into: the company’s sponsorship of the most lovable, awesome baseball team in human history.
UPDATE: A couple of readers have written in with their own Kozy Shack banana variants – which involve taking either the tapioca or one of the existing rice varieties, slicing bananas into it, and mixing it up with Nilla wafers (or this organic alternative.) Excellent idea.
Here's what Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently told Barrons – the weekly financial publication from the Wall Street Journal – in an interview about his views on global economics.
Barrons: What great books have you read recently that you can recommend?
Krugman: I just reread a good part of John Maynard Keynes's Essays in Persuasion, especially "The Great Slump of 1930," which is awesomely relevant right now. And while it has nothing much to do with the crisis, I'd highly recommend Dan Koeppel's Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, which tells you a lot about the history of globalization along the way.
The paperback version of Banana was released this past January; the hardcover came out a year earlier. The book is about the crisis facing the world's most popular and important fruit – a crisis preceded by thousands of years of history and legend, and precipitated by a century of globalization and ignoring the lessons of the past. Banana – like this blog – weaves together a story that covers science, economics, history, pop culture, religion, and myth, explaining why this fruit, which millions love, and which millions more depend on to survive, is in danger of disappearing.
There are reviews of the book in the column to the left, purchasing links to the right, and tons of blog entries below. You can learn even more about the book and the blog here.
I’m writing this, literally, from the chair at the dentist’s office, where I just received six shots of novacaine as prep for treatment of an abscess. So?
Well, to make the needle feel less piquant, the usual procedure is to swab the gums with a numbing gel. As soon as the cotton swab got close, I detected the aroma of banana (ok, fake banana.) The taste was roughly akin to the same flavor of Laffy Taffy, which is to say absolutely FUNSGUSTING!
It turns out that the product comes in tons of flavors. My doc also has cherry and choco-mint.
The hygienist was kind enough to angle the exam light while I snapped this pic.
Here comes the boss. He’s totally baffled. As the procedure begins, he asks me if I believe in God.
No kidding.
Update: Made it home alive. Apparently, the dental world is lousy with flavored anesthetic gels. Dozens of brands, dozens of palate-pleasing varieties. I’m almost tempted to throw a party…the featured product of which would have to be the pina-colada flavored salve offered as part of the Harry J. Bosworth Company’s somehow-appropriately named “ComfortCaine” line of goods (the company also notes that the item is excellent as a gag-reflex suppressant. This is getting worse by the minute, so I’ll just stop.)
Interesting strategy at my favorite local convenience store, on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Rosemont In the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles (just steps from Dodger Stadium.)
Instead of the typical branded, presented-in-a-box fruit Chiquita is selling in many U.S. convenience stores, the fruit here is bought at local supermarkets and sold in an ordinary basket. At the current price – 69 cents per banana – the store manager told me customers purchased a respectable fifty or so a day. Still, he thought he could do better, and was about to add a twofer, with a pair of bananas going for a buck.
The DIY approach nets the local shop a considerable profit over Chiquita's all-in-one strategy, which involves a national distribution network of refrigerated product, each fruit with a sticker on it, to of about 13,000 convenience stores. Chiquita's suggested retail price for its product is 75 to 99 cents. The benefit, it says, is that that the controlled supplyand special packaging allows the fruit to arrive at the stores perfectly ripe – eliminating the need for store managers to spend time waiting for the green bananas typically found on supermarket shelves to ripen. The downside is profit margins: Chiquita charges C-stores about forty cents per fruit. My 7-Eleven manager can buy bananas at the Trader Joe's down the street for half that.
Analysis: though it is certainly more profitable for convenience stores to adopt the DIY approach, most local mini-marts probably won't do so – meaning that the Chiquita method will likely be more successful. Whatever else the company does wrong or right, this is a visionary and important (though as-yet unproven) strategy, because it demonstrates the banana's changing – and critical – role in the American diet: as the best, most affordable stand-in for the mountains of junk food that have created a massive juvenile health crisis.
This is just about the coolest thing ever. Dutch designer Anneke Jacobs first made this light fixture out of banana boxes in 2003 – but now, she’s released DIY instructions. I’m going to get to work on mine right away (you can buy one, too, if the project seems too daunting.)
Greenhouse bananas in Iceland; photo reproduced under Wikimedia Commons license. Original here.
Bananas normally need to grow under tropical conditions: even in the U.S., a commercial crop isn’t viable, because California and Florida aren’t quite hot enough for large-scale production. One might think that Iceland – where the mean daily temperature over a year is about seven degrees Celsius (44 Fahrenheit) – would hardly qualify. But the North Atlantic island nation has a banana trump-card: huge stores of geothermal energy beneath its volcanic landscape. That means greenhouses, and – in an effort to become the world’s first full-carbon neutral nation – the Icelandic government has decided that it is going to try to stop importing bananas from Latin America, and grow its entire supply indoors.
So far, the effort is mostly symbolic, despite some (false) reports that the country is now exporting the fruit. In 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, Iceland imported 4.7 million tones of bananas (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; link will download PDF file.) With only 1,000 square meters currently devoted to at-home production, boatload after boatload would still be needed to satisfy the nation’s exceptionally hunger for the fruit. Iceland is the Western hemisphere’s number one per capita banana consuming nation: the average Icelander eats 30 pounds of the fruit per year (in the developed world, only New Zealanders like bananas better, with each Kiwi eating 44 pounds per annum. The U.S. falls into fourth place, at 27 pounds, just edged out by Slovenia, which has a one pound – or four banana – advantage.)
Still, the effort is a noble one – though I find it a little odd that Iceland’s internal production appears to be limited to Cavendish, the standard supermarket fruit (that’s what the variety pictured above appears to be, as well as the ones in the image linked here, though I could be wrong, and welcome corrections.) With so many other amazing and more delicious kinds of banana – and with hothouse production eliminating the usual problems with those varieties (presence of disease; distance shipping; fragility; variable weather conditions) – it would seem that Iceland’s small crop could also be a gourmet crop. Isn’t that what the world’s hungriest banana consumers (almost) deserve?
THE BANANA BLOG is about the world's most endangered - and dangerous - fruit. THE BIG PARADE is about stairways, route and transit geekery, and pedestrian pursuits in Los Angeles. ASYMPTOTES is about writing and obsession. It is new, like an abandoned subdivision about to be invaded by zombies. You can also read all the topics at once.
