Bananas Read online

  Banana powder is used in dry mixes and crunch toppings, and banana extract is used to flavor beverages, dairy products, and bakery products.80 Chiquita and Dole both came out in the 1990s with tropical fruit juice mixtures that include banana. Canned sliced bananas are used mainly in bakery products, desserts, fruit cocktails, fruit salads, and ice cream toppings.81 In addition, methods to produce frozen, whole, peeled, and sliced bananas have been developed for use in dairy products, frozen novelties, puddings, and bakery products.

  Bananas appear in a variety of forms in the supermarket but it is somewhat surprising that banana flavoring is mostly limited to yogurt, baby food, and gelatin desserts. A few cake and banana bread mixes and banana-flavored cereals are available. Chiquita marketed banana-shaped cookies with chocolate bottoms in 1995 but they did not survive the competition with other cookie products in the supermarket. The only banana-flavored cookies in a recent visit to two major grocery chains were found in the baby food section. Ben and Jerry Ice Cream comes in Chunky Monkey: banana flavored with chocolate and nuts—but that, along with strawberry banana frozen yogurt and Friendly’s Royal Banana Split Sundae Ice Cream, are the sole banana-flavored frozen desserts in two major chains in the Washington, D.C., area.

  Banana or plantain chips are included in some of the snack offerings of grocery stores, and natural food companies that market dried fruit and nut mixtures are beginning to include bananas. Planters, a more mainstream company, came out with Caribbean Crunch Snack Mix that includes peanuts, cashews, sesame snack sticks, and banana and pineapple pieces.

  Bananas may also appear in commercial products as “a flavor background builder or bodying agent.”82 The fruit softens the sometimes harsh taste of citric acid while at the same time the flavor does not overpower other ingredients. Bananas are also used as a thickening agent, adding body and water stabilization to sauces. Bananas have become an unnoticed ingredient in a number of food products such as barbecue and other sauces, glazes, gravy, soups, and salad dressings. Banana-flavored or banana-enhanced products can now be found throughout the supermarket, not just in the produce aisle.

  The United States was known as a nation of fruit eaters in the nineteenth century. Was the insertion of bananas into the American diet irreversible? Would Americans give up eating bananas if the price rose in comparison to other fruit? Bananas are so taken for granted today that it is difficult to imagine consumer protests of the type that emerged during the tariff controversy in 1924. Would the millions of people who eat a banana a day quietly switch to another fruit or would they panic the way parents did during the banana shortages of World War II? Bananas are part of our diet and many people rely on them for health reasons, but they have never become necessary for a particular holiday celebration the way that cranberries have. Efforts to pair bananas with meat loaf or hotdogs were not successful in the way apples complement pork. Bananas no longer appear at formal meals or on special occasions. Despite our enormous per capita consumption, the fruit has remained the “children’s food,” a snack seldom taken seriously, yet comfortable and homey.

  7

  CELEBRATING

  BananaS

  FOR MANY YEARS, THE TWIN cities of Fulton, Kentucky, and South Fulton, Tennessee, called themselves the Banana Capital of the United States. For a thirty-year period they celebrated with a week-long International Banana Festival that culminated in a parade featuring a one-ton banana pudding. Fulton was the site of a major railroad junction with an ice factory where thousands of railroad cars of bananas were checked before being dispatched throughout the United States. The people of Fulton took something like a banana seriously and made it important. The Fulton banana festival is an example of how the banana has been absorbed into the culture of the United States, adopted by a small Midwestern town and made the focus of community identity.

  The residents of Fulton and the peoples of Central America were able to connect with one another through the banana trade, not just by politics and economics but through cultural interests. The initial connection was economic but the festival founders were able to foster it on concerns about communism in Latin America, and a perceived need to bring culture to the children of Fulton.

  Today Fulton, Kentucky, is a quiet agricultural town near the Mississippi River of just over three thousand residents, surrounded by corn and tobacco fields. The largest structure in town is the grain elevator. South Fulton, Tennessee, just across the state line, has a population of just under three thousand. But Fulton was not always so quiet. The Illinois Central Railroad, the first to develop refrigerated cars, began shipping bananas out of New Orleans in 1880.1 Freight trains of the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad with a hundred or more cars loaded with bananas regularly traveled the line north from New Orleans to Fulton, one of the major intersections in the national railway system where five lines met. Here they were serviced and separated to be assigned to trains traveling north, east, and west. More than half the bananas imported into the United States traveled through Fulton. This explains their claim to being the Banana Capital of the United States.2

  Downtown Fulton, Kentucky, during the Thirtieth Annual International Banana Festival (September 1992).

  Their feeling of connectedness to the peoples of Latin America developed through the bananas on the freight trains, even though most of the people in Fulton would never see the banana plantations in the Caribbean tropics or even the actual bananas that passed through their town. They saw just the freight cars being iced in the summer or heated in the winter. Only resident fruit company inspectors opened the boxcar doors and actually touched the fruit. But the connection was there and was actively encouraged during the 1960s and 1970s.

  The freight yards were a major employer in Fulton and representatives of the major banana-importing companies, United Fruit and Standard Fruit, lived there. Their job was to inspect the banana cars, checking temperature and making adjustments, to keep the fruit from ripening too quickly in the warm months or from freezing in the winter. Inspectors checked the temperature of the fruit by inserting a thermometer, “like a baby thermometer,” into two bananas from each car, top and bottom. One long-time Fulton resident recalled picking up and taking home the bananas in the railroad yard that had been discarded after testing. Inspectors kept records for each car, forwarding them to the company, and kept in touch with service representatives further along the routes to determine what sort of weather the fruit cars might encounter before reaching their various destinations. “Messengers” rode with the fruit trains in the caboose. They were paid expenses and mileage plus $4.00 a day. Eight to ten men would leave New Orleans and accompany the freight as the cars were split off into separate trains in Memphis, Fulton, Blueford, Chicago, Dubuque, Minneapolis, and Cincinnati.

  Bill Jolley, a retired inspector of twenty years for Standard Fruit, remembers that it was a worrisome job. If bananas were kept too cold, they would turn black and would not ripen. If they were too hot, they ripened too fast. Company service inspectors wore long rubber gloves to guard against tarantulas when they reached into the banana bunches. Paul Westpheling, long-time publisher of the Fulton newspaper, remembered a friend entering his office one day displaying a small python wrapped around his arm. The snake had been found in a bunch of bananas in one of the freight cars.

  At times as many as three or four banana boats a week arrived in New Orleans and were unloaded onto freight trains. As soon as a train was made up, it started on its way. The trip to Fulton took twelve hours. The banana trains often arrived in clusters; there might not be any trains for a week or two and then for a couple of days they would come in every three or four hours.3 The trains might arrive at any time of the day or night, and when the whistle blew, men and boys left their beds, their school books, or their regular jobs to head for the freight yards to service the arriving train.

  One resident remembered that boys first got a paper route, then as they got older went to work icing railroad cars. The young workers were known as banana mo
nkeys. Bill Robertson, Fulton City commissioner and retired teacher, remembers getting calls at the high school for twenty-five boys to ice a banana train. When the banana trains came in at night, the boys would be sleepy the next day in class. It was considered a good job because servicing often only took only one or two hours with workers paid for a minimum of four hours.

  The Wright ice factory, the largest one-story ice plant in the United States, was founded in 1898 to serve all northbound Illinois Central freight cars.4 The plant was located at the railroad yard and produced 300-pound blocks of ice for cooling the cars. The blocks were moved by chain along a big frame half a mile long at the same height as the cars. There were tracks on each side of the frame so that cars could be iced from both sides. Men and boys used big metal hooks to move the blocks and then broke them up with picks into 100-pound chunks to be placed in bunkers at each end of a banana car. Each car could take between 600 and 1000 pounds.

  In the winter heaters were placed in the compartments instead of ice. At first the heaters used charcoal; later they used alcohol or kerosene. Eventually heaters had thermostats which made them easier to control. The freight cars also had vents which the inspectors could adjust by guesstimate to control the temperature. As they were serviced, switch engines moved the freight cars around the railroad yard and reorganized them into smaller trains for further destinations.

  The germ of the idea for the International Banana Festival came when Johanna Westpheling, editor of the local Fulton paper, accompanied a Fulton high school singer and ukulele player to the Arthur Godfrey show in 1958. As Mrs. Westpheling was talking with Godfrey, she described Fulton as the Banana Capital of the United States, which caught his attention. According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “the girl was good. Godfrey kept inviting her back, and Mrs. Westpheling kept coming with her, plugging Fulton bananas each chance she got.”5

  Mrs. Westpheling had been a reporter for the Washington Post and the Washington Star during World War II. In 1947 she and her husband, Paul, moved to Fulton where they purchased the Fulton County News; Paul was the publisher and Jo the editor. In 1955 they bought the local radio station, which Johanna Westpheling managed. Paul Westpheling eventually became the president of the Ken-Tenn Broadcasting Corporation. To this they added the Fulton Shopper weekly newspaper in 1966.6

  Back home in Fulton, Mrs. Westpheling and a group of friends were “sitting around thinking” of how to promote business and culture in Fulton (which they considered the “cultural desert of America”) when the idea of a banana festival began to take shape.7 According to Nathan Wade, “We kicked the idea around, but it wasn’t until five years later we did it.”8 This small group of influential citizens—including Doug Burnett of the Pure Milk Company, Nathan Wade, owner of the furniture factory, and Mary Nelle Wright, wife of the local pharmacist and writer for the paper—appealed for support from the banana companies. Four of the organizers traveled to New Orleans in September 1963 where they met with representatives from the National Association of Banana Agents, a trade group who agreed to match $15,000 in local fund-raising.9 Gene Bond of the Standard Fruit Company agreed to donate a railroad carload of bananas and to supply financial help for the first festival.10 (One resident recalled that United Fruit Company would have nothing to do with the festival.)

  Over the years Standard Fruit and Dole donated tons of bananas, some of which went into making enormous annual banana puddings. In 1971 a photograph in the Fulton County News showed “Gene Bond of Standard Fruit and Steamship Company, an ardent supporter and financial backer of the International Banana Festival from the first year” with the 1971 Banana Festival Princess.11 Bunches of bananas were hung on trees, light posts, and parking meters along the parade route so that spectators might help themselves. There was great indignation when anyone ventured to appropriate an entire stalk.

  The group also approached the recently organized Tennessee and Kentucky Arts Commissions for help with the festival. Over the years the commissions provided art exhibitions, craft demonstrations and exhibits, classical and jazz concerts, and on one memorable occasion, a traveling troupe from the Joffrey Ballet who performed in a tent. Patricia Alvestia, prima ballerina of Ecuador, attended the festival in 1967. Not everyone appreciated the program, however. One of the festival organizers remembered one man complaining about men in leotards.

  Jo Westpheling and Mary Nelle Wright also went to Washington to ask their congressmen for help. They met President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, who helped organize a sister city connection with Quito, Ecuador. They were able, as two western Kentucky women journalists, to travel with Lady Bird Johnson and enlist her support for the festival, as well as that of the Office of Inter-American Programs, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in Washington, D.C., whose deputy director, J. Manuel Espinosa, attended the festival in 1967.12

  The first festival was held November 4–9, 1963. “With a rail car full of bananas, a commitment from Miss America, and $3,000, the first festival took off with an air of blistering excitement.”13 The festival included the Banana Princess Pageant, an appearance by Miss America 1963, and a one-ton banana pudding. Music was provided by La Reina Del Ejercito, the Guatemalan Army Marimba Band.14 “After it was over, the newly formed festival association, which was made up of interested citizens, came out proud and with a profit of more than $20,000,” setting in motion plans for an annual festival.15

  The festival began in the Cold War era of the early 1960s “as an experiment in human relations showing the coincidence of interests between the peoples of the two American continents.… The theme, Project-Unite Us, was conceived with the ultimate goal to ‘fight communism with bananas.’ ”16 According to the program published for the sixth annual festival in 1968, “in their efforts in the field of people-to-people diplomacy Twin Citizens feel that their AMIGO program of friendly understanding between the youth of the two countries is a blow aimed at the beachhead which communism is attempting to establish in these banana-producing countries.”17 The program also contained a statement from the government of the City of Fulton supporting the festival “because we feel that this small gesture, by a small community in Kentucky, has done much more than millions spent through Washington.”18

  Fulton’s efforts were very much in the tradition of the American missionary spirit. Americans had long believed that if only other people could be exposed to American culture, they would naturally become like Americans themselves. All one had to do was show visitors American institutions and expose them to American goodwill and all would be well. For example, European middle managers were brought to America after World War II for goodwill tours of factories and businesses combined with barbecues and small-town welcomes under the United States Technical Assistance and Productivity Program, part of the Marshall Plan. One town in Iowa even produced a play for their visitors.19 It was soon realized that more was needed, however, and large numbers of European middle managers began to attend MBA programs at universities in the United States. Yet the initial impulse was friendship and hospitality.

  In the 1960s the banana festival was seen as a truly international affair, bringing together the people of banana-producing countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela with the people of Middle America through “Project-Unite Us.”20 President Kennedy sent a message to the festival commending the Twin Cities “for contributions to the banana industry, and as a part of vital economic link with our neighbors to the South.”21 President Johnson praised the celebration for its key role in the relations between the United States and Latin America, and in 1967 sent Averill Harriman, undersecretary of state for political affairs, as his personal representative.22 In addition to Harriman, attendees in 1967 included Ambassadors Jose Antonio Correa of Ecuador and Gonzalo J. Facio of Costa Rica.23

  Standard Fruit Company sponsored the back page advertisement of the 1970 festival program, congratulating Fult
on on its achievement:

  THIS FESTIVAL IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT A COMMUNITY CAN DO WHEN EVERYONE WORKS TOGETHER TO PROMOTE GOODWILL AND FRIENDSHIP. This festival is, however, much more than a week of local, fun-filled activities. Over the years it has grown into a meaningful goodwill program between the Americas. [It is] a people-to-people project with our neighbors to the south. Today it makes a valuable contribution to inter-American relations. We at Standard Fruit are happy to have been of assistance in developing the first festival in 1962. We enjoy participating each year and look forward to a continuation of successful festivals for years to come.

  The idea of the banana festival “hit the fancy of the whole country” as one Fulton resident put it. It was unique and was immediately successful. The early festivals were covered by the Voice of America, and television coverage brought Fulton to national attention. The State Department made several films at the festivals to show in Latin American countries. During the 1960s representatives from banana-producing countries in Latin America who attended the festival included students, diplomats, artists, musicians, reporters, and educators. It was “a real party time for the whole town.”24

  Fulton families hosted twenty-five to fifty Latin American students, ages 16 to 20, for two to three weeks each summer before the festival. The exchange was organized through the Alliance for Progress and lasted into the late 1970s.25 It was hoped that the visitors “might see and believe in the kind of people who inhabit a small but typical town in the United States.”26 The students visited schools and churches, went to parties and meetings, and toured the surrounding countryside, businesses, clubs, and community centers. It was hoped that “Fulton’s genuine friendliness had done more to enhance understand[ing] and goodwill than a hundred textbooks and a thousand lectures could provide.”27