Bananas Read online

  © 2000 by the Smithsonian Books

  All rights reserved

  EDITOR: Ruth W. Spiegel

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jenkins, Virginia Scott.

  Bananas: an American history / Virginia S. Jenkins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56098-966-1 (alk. paper)

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-58834-412-0

  1. Banana trade—United States–History.

  2. Bananas–Social aspects—-United States.

  I. Title.

  HD9259.B3 U537 2000

  380.1′414772′0973—dc21 00-027403

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

  This is an electronic reissue (ISBN 9781588344120) of the original paperback edition

  Except for photographs 1, 5, 30, and 32, all photography is by Virginia Scott Jenkins; these four photographs are courtesy of the Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware. Except for the same photographs and 28 and 29, all photographs are courtesy of Ann Lovell’s Banana Museum, Auburn, Washington. For permission to reproduce any of the illustrations, please correspond directly with the owners of the works. Smithsonian Books does not retain reproduction rights for these illustrations individually, or maintain a file of addresses for photo sources.

  This book may be purchased for education, business, or sales promotional use. For more information please write: Special Markets Department, Smithsonian Books, P.O. Box 37012, MRC 513, Washington, DC 20013

  www.smithsonianbooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 INTRODUCING BANANAS

  2 POLITICS AND BANANAS

  3 TRANSPORTING BANANAS

  4 SELLING BANANAS

  5 PERIL AND PANACEA

  6 EATING BANANAS

  7 CELEBRATING BANANAS

  8 MEANING OF BANANAS

  APPENDIX: SONGS OF BANANAS

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank the Winterthur Library for a one-month appointment as a Research Fellow and the opportunity to explore the use of bananas in nineteenth-century American art, cookbooks, and etiquette manuals. Ann Lovell’s Banana Museum in Auburn, Washington, has been a wonderful resource and I am thankful for her continued interest and for allowing me to disrupt the museum to take photographs for this book. Thanks to all my friends, family, and students who contributed banana jokes, advertisements, and enough banana stuff to start my own museum. I also want to thank Thomas Anastasio and Sally Levy who read and commented on the book in various drafts. I am grateful to my husband and to Musa, the sailor dog, for their love and patient support during the course of this project.

  INTRODUCTION

  The field of food studies is growing as more scholars become interested in the historical, social, and cultural meanings of food. Historians, philosophers, folklorists, and literary scholars are turning to the once-mundane topic of food to study human nature and specific cultures by the way people gather, cook, eat, market, and talk about food. Food can be a symbol of power, an aesthetic display, a community ritual, or an expression of ideology or identity. The study of food can provide a window into issues of gender, class, race, and ethnicity.1 Food and its attendant meanings provide the basis for many of our daily actions, for wars of conquest and trade, for political conflicts, and for the identification of the foreigner, the “other.”

  A study of the banana at first may appear frivolous, but the social history of the use of everyday food can offer a window into the culture of the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “When unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire—or are given—contextual meanings by those who use them.”2 This study is a look at the context of the banana in the United States, a way to elicit meanings from the ways bananas have been absorbed into popular culture, to explain ourselves, our politics, culture, fears, and dreams.

  The first Boy Scout Handbook, published in 1911, supplied a list of good deeds that a boy might do each day, including chopping wood for mother’s stove, helping an old lady across the street, and picking banana peels up off the sidewalk. Why were banana peels mentioned specifically rather than litter or garbage in general? How many peels were there? Who was dropping them? Was this really a problem? What was going on in 1911 on our city streets?

  I remember several instances from my childhood that may have piqued my own interest in bananas. When I was about nine years old, I read all the Lucy Fitch Perkins books I could find about twins in various countries and historical settings. The Filipino Twins family lived in a thatched-roof house on stilts and it was the job of the boy twin to polish the floor using banana leaves.3 I actually remembered it as banana skins that he used to skate on around the floor and only discovered years later that it was the leaves. This sounded like a wonderful way to do housecleaning and fit into my American perceptions of the slippery properties of the banana peel.

  About the same time, I was entranced by a banana stalk hanging in a neighborhood grocery store window. It had a single hand of bananas left on it and I wanted that stalk. It took me some time to gather enough courage to enter the store and ask for it, but once I had the stalk in hand, oh, it was a thing of wonder. With it I could conjure up images of jungles and foreign travel. To me, bananas represented exotic, mysterious, romantic places.

  Then there’s the third banana memory. It is a recipe that my mother may have gotten from the New York Times Magazine of September 14, 1947, for bananas spread with mustard, rolled in a ham slice secured with toothpicks, and baked in cheese sauce.4 This dish made an occasional appearance on the family dinner table. It was the only thing I ever cooked that my husband refused to eat.

  Questions of where, when, and how bananas are eaten illustrate changes in diet, eating habits, and etiquette. Bananas have been instrumental in public health campaigns for clean streets and tuberculosis control. International fruit companies were leaders in the development of modern advertising and marketing strategies. They stimulated trade and political relations between the United States and the countries of the Caribbean and laid the basis for the development of modern multinational corporations. The story of the banana illustrates aspects of the development of our national transportation system, including railroads, steamships, and trucking. Banana jokes, songs, and symbolism also allow us to look at our changing mores and concerns.

  Before the 1880s, most Americans had never seen, much less eaten, a banana but by 1910 the country was flooded with them. Transformed from a luxury and a novelty, bananas had become the poor man’s fruit. In that year it was estimated that three billion bananas were imported into the United States—“a shipment which would cover an area twenty feet wide reaching from New York to San Francisco, or, placed end to end, would extend thirteen times around the Earth at the Equator.”5

  Throughout most of the twentieth century, residents of the United States have eaten more pounds of bananas per capita than any other fruit. Unlike kiwi fruit or mangoes, bananas quickly lost the allure of the exotic. Thanks to early marketing decisions by United Fruit, bananas are perceived as always available and always cheap. In 1995 Americans spent over $3.4 billion on imported bananas: a banana a week for every person in the country.6 By 1999 annual consumption had risen to seventy-five bananas per person, or a banana and a half a week.7 That is over twenty-seven and a half pounds of bananas per person each year, nine pounds more than our annual consumption of apples, the next most popular fruit.8 Bananas have become as “American” as apples or strawberries despite the fact that virtually all our bananas are imported from th
e countries of the Caribbean basin.

  Bananas have become ubiquitous, truly a part of our lives for the past hundred years. Bananas are so common that they are almost invisible. Few supermarket shoppers think about where the bananas came from. In the 1990s we got 60 percent of our winter vegetables from Mexico, and are so used to the availability of foreign fruits and vegetables that we seldom think about their origin. Bananas are our friends—ordinary, funny, homey. By looking closely at the banana, we can learn a great deal about our way of life, our trade and transport systems, and our politics. As the banana quickly changed from a luxury to the cheapest fruit available, it found an enduring niche in American humor and folklore. Bananas are part of our national cuisine, and they also appear in popular songs, jokes, vaudeville acts, and films. We have eaten them for a wide variety of healthful reasons and some have even tried to smoke the peels. This book is about the importance of bananas in American culture and the meanings that bananas have assumed for us.

  “Banana,” Artemas Ward, Grocers’ Hand-Book and Directory for 1886.

  The first chapter traces the introduction of bananas to the United States in the nineteenth century. There are unauthenticated reports that a shipment of bananas reached Salem, Massachusetts, in 1690 and that the New Englanders boiled the fruit with pork and promptly gave up in disgust.9 It would be another hundred and fifty years before the next report of bananas in East Coast ports. Visitors to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 could purchase their first banana, wrapped in tinfoil, for ten cents, a high price in those days. It would be another twenty years before bananas were widely available.

  The second chapter traces the development of the major American banana-importing companies, the original multinational corporations of the twentieth century. Several enterprising American ship captains recognized that there was a market for bananas, and began to encourage the people of the Caribbean to grow enough for export, as well as undertaking the risky business of shipping bananas to East Coast ports. As these fruit companies diversified, grew, and merged, they lost their original identities in huge multinational conglomerates.

  Chapter 3 explores the growth of our modern transportation system using the banana as an example of a perishable commodity that was difficult to move from producer to consumer. Steamships, refrigeration, packaging, railroads, and trucking all have played an important role in the banana business, often inspiring modifications and new inventions to handle the fruit and to meet the demands of the grocer and the consumer.

  Chapter 4 is about marketing, the business of selling bananas to the customer. In Boston, United Fruit decided on a policy that was to change America’s eating habits. Bananas would be marketed as cheaply as possible—as the poor man’s fruit.

  Chapter 5 looks at public health and sanitation issues in connection with the popularization of the banana. The banana made its appearance in the United States at the time when Americans first were learning about germs, vitamins, and calories. The issues of immigration, street cleaning, nutrition, and the fight against tuberculosis all contained a banana motif. Bananas were advertised as the fruit in the germ-proof wrapper to assuage fears of food contamination. In addition, bananas were touted as an almost complete food, full of vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates.

  The sixth chapter takes a closer look at the consumption of bananas. In the nineteenth century, bananas were eaten in the United States on special occasions such as Christmas and elegant christening parties. In the twentieth century, banana splits and banana bread have become ubiquitous, and almost all of us slice bananas onto our breakfast cereal. Researchers have found ways to preserve, powder, and distill bananas so that many new banana-flavored products have found their way onto supermarket shelves since 1990.

  Chapter 7 is devoted to the twin citrucking all have playedties of Fulton, Kentucky, and South Fulton, Tennessee. These places were called the Banana Capital of the World in the 1960s when the community began to celebrate their connections with Central America. The Fulton Annual International Banana Festival was held for over thirty years, despite the fact that banana trains from New Orleans ceased stopping in Fulton for inspection in the early 1970s.

  Finally there’s a look at how bananas have become rooted in American life despite the fact that they have never been a selection of the Fruit of the Month Club.10 Their place in American culture is very much like that of the hot dog. Almost everyone likes bananas, but no one takes them seriously. Bananas appear in songs, films, and jokes. Everyone knows the danger of slipping on a banana peel. Bananas are funny, sexy, kitsch, and smoking banana peels was once considered cool. Bananas also represent romance, the tropics, and adventure. The last chapter explores the many meanings ascribed to bananas in American culture.

  1

  INTRODUCING

  BananaS

  THE BANANA IS ANY OF A VARIETY of tropical or subtropical plants of the genus Musa (possibly from Muz, Arabic for banana) that bear clusters of long yellow or reddish fruits. There are sixty-seven species and more than two hundred varieties of Musa.1 Bananas may have been cultivated as early as 1000 B.C. in the rain forests of Southeast Asia. Arabs brought the fruit to the Middle East and Africa in the seventh century. In 1482 the Portuguese found bananas growing as a staple food on Africa’s west coast in what is now Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and transplanted them to the Canary Islands.2

  The botanical name of the type of banana familiar to grocery shoppers in the United States, Musa sapientum, means “fruit of the wise men.” It was so named by the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Linnaeus because the Roman historian Pliny (A.D. 23–79) wrote that the sages of India rested in the shade of the plant and ate its fruit.3 The word banana was first printed in English in the seventeenth century.4

  Linnaeus named the related plantain Musa paradisiaca or “heavenly fruit” because of a legend that it, not the apple, was the forbidden fruit of Paradise.5 In a variety of West African languages the fruit Musa is known as “banna,” “bana,” “gbana,” “abana,” “funana,” and “banane.”

  “The Banana Family,” Story of the Banana, Education Department, United Fruit, Boston, 1936.

  Plantains are starchy and thick-skinned bananas that are used mostly for cooking, while the everyday bananas imported into the United States are usually eaten raw. The flesh of plantains is salmon-colored when ripe and cooked, and tastes different at each stage of its development.6 Plantains are integral to the diet of Africa and Latin America, cooked the same ways as potatoes, but until recently have not been imported in large quantities or found in grocery stores in many parts of the United States. They have never been marketed on the grand scale of bananas, and for that reason have not been included in this book’s exploration of bananas’ effect on mainstream culture.

  There is no evidence that bananas grew in the Western Hemisphere before the voyages of Columbus, and the Spanish are credited with bringing bananas to the New World from the Canary Islands. In 1516 Friar Tomas de Berlanga, a Catholic missionary priest of the Order of Predicadores, landed on the Island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and planted banana stems or rhizomes as the cheapest and most satisfactory food for the growing African slave population. When Friar Tomas was made Bishop of Panama, he took banana plants with him to the mainland.7 Vasco de Quiroga, first bishop of Michoácan, is said to have introduced bananas to Mexico.8 The plants spread rapidly throughout Central America, Mexico, and southern Florida, so much so that later observers believed the banana to be native to this continent.9 The first English colonists of Roanoke, Virginia, took banana stocks with them from the Caribbean islands to plant in a decidedly nontropical climate.10

  Bananas do not grow on trees; in fact, the banana is a huge herbaceous plant that grows to a height of fifteen to thirty feet. It is perhaps the largest plant on earth that does not have a woody stem above the ground.11 This makes it susceptible to wind-storm damage. The plants grow from rhizomes that have buds or “eyes” like a potato, and ne
w plants grow up from shoots around the parent stalk. The rhizomes can be separated and transplanted to establish new plants.12 The commercial bananas familiar to most Americans have three sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two, which causes the fruit to be large, hardy, and seedless. The tiny dark specks in the center of a banana are the infertile vestigial seeds. Diploid bananas, with two sets of chromosomes, do contain numbers of hard seeds, some as big as half a pencil eraser.13

  About Bananas, Education Department, United Fruit, Boston, 1936.

  Commercially grown bananas are planted in rows “very much like hills of corn except, of course, at a greater distance apart.”14 Planting can be spaced in a plantation so that fruit is continuously coming to maturity. As the plants develop, they produce a red flower that points downward toward the ground. Eventually the bracts drop off, exposing the young bananas that originate from the clusters of flowers arranged spirally around the stalk. As the fruits develop they bend upward so that they end by pointing toward the sky. The fruit grows on a single stalk with seven to ten bunches each holding twelve to fourteen individual fruits. Bunches are known as “hands,” and the individual fruits are called “fingers.”

  It takes about eighteen months for the banana plant to grow from a shoot to produce a mature bunch of fruit.15 The stalks, each containing up to 150 individual bananas, generally weigh from eighty to a hundred pounds. Bananas are usually cut green, even in the tropics, since they tend to toughen, sour, and split open, attracting insects, if allowed to ripen on the plant. Each plant fruits only once; when the plant has produced its fruit, it is cut down and left to decay to form humus that supports another shoot growing from the same stem.