(I have become full-fledged Violet band member! Yay! Okay moving on)
What on earth have I been doing? For one thing, delving into the unexpectedly complex world of bananas.
About a week ago, November 10th to be exact, Grace and I dissected both an organic and inorganic banana to see if we could tell the difference.
The first thing we noted was the color. The organic bananas all had a curiously green tint to them while the inorganic bananas seemed a perfect canary yellow, exactly what you would expect of the product of countless herbicide and pesticide influences. The inorganic banana, at least at first glance, was so much more dependably uniform and cookie-cutter resemblant of your ideal banana, that when compared to the organic banana, you could almost pretend it was fake.
Cutting open a cross section of each, the organic banana had a distinctly "nicer" taste to it. It was as if the inorganic bananas had been stripped of their personality.
Of course, personality and individuality are not always what one is looking for when they open a Chiquita.
For inorganic bananas, the peels were thinner, the bananas were both thicker and longer, there were less traces of seeds (although there was hardly any to speak of in the organic banana either). It became clear to us that the inorganic bananas had been manufactured to consumer ease, catering to their needs of a predictable, staple fruit. It's no wonder the banana is so perfect, we need it to be.
As a supplement, Amanda passed on some background articles about the origins and history of bananas. One article briefly described a legend where Eve of the Garden of Eden had been tempted by, not an apple, but a banana. We have come to hold the banana in a staggeringly high regard. Just imagine what the world would be without bananas. And yet they are in abundance; they are accessible and cheap. But what is the price of popularity for bananas?
Doing my own research, I happened upon a documentary called Big Boys Gone Bananas, (look it up, it's on Netflix) which is a documentary based on another documentary by the same filmmaker, Fredrik Gertten, called Bananas!*. The original documentary, Bananas!*, is a story of the lives of six workers of Dole Food Company (probably the second biggest banana distributor), suing Dole for negligence after a pesticide Dole used on the bananas made the workers sterile.
As it turns out, this kind of malicious and sketchy business practice, especially in Central and Latin America, was and is not all that uncommon. Way before Chiquita joined forces with Fyffes to become the world's largest banana producing conglomerate, it started as a somewhat smaller company called United Foods. Despite starting out meaning well in 1944, in the 60's there were many allegations of worker abuse, exploitation of child labor, and the like.
If you google "banana controversy", the source of the debate is not always obvious. Why this "controversy" around a huge corporation using shady farming methods? Of course it's wrong, shouldn't someone be protesting this? That's where it gets sticky. You can't just boycott bananas, unfortunately. According to www.chiquitabananas.com, the average American eats 27 pounds of bananas a year. There are whole countries whose economies depend on the crop.
The term "banana republic" meaning "(noun, derogatory) a small nation, especially in Central America, dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital" according to google, gets its name from the situation in Central American countries in the first decades of the 1900's. When banana companies realized they could make a lot of money on exports, they bought huge plots of land from the dictatorial government and evaded taxes. The exports mostly benefited government officials, while these large corporations exploited both the land and the labor of natives. All the while the countries' economies became more and more dependent on banana exports.
Half of me wants nothing to do with bananas anymore, or at least never to eat a banana again without careful research about its background and origin, organic or inorganic. And regrettably, the other half wants to turn the other cheek for the sake of convenience, telling myself that one person consciously consuming cannot possibly make a difference. But then I realize that that's not the point. It's about being a better person. It's about choosing how things affect me in this world. Do I want to put bananas tainted by conspiracy and iffy ethical jargon into my body? It's all part of a much larger debate, and perhaps now more than ever, you are what you eat.
Sources: http://www.jimmccluskey.com/history-of-the-banana/
http://blog.mapsofworld.com/2011/08/26/where-do-bananas-come-from/
http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is-killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/
http://www.bananasthemovie.com/pesticide-lawsuits-%E2%80%93-a-dbcp-overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas!*
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=banana+republic+define
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