Bananas Read online

  At the end of an intensive century of advertising, the question still remains: are advertisements effective? They can promote short-term sales but can they really build customer loyalty to brand names?74 Particularly for something like fruit, brand names are difficult to make meaningful. United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Brands International, has lost market share to other North American and Central American companies while the people of the United States continue to eat surprising numbers of bananas. Bananas remain the cheapest fruit in the supermarket, representing a triumph in distribution as well as of advertising and marketing programs.

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  PERIL AND PANACEA

  GROWING INTEREST IN NEW information about nutrition and domestic science completely changed the way people thought of their world, especially about what they ate. Bananas were introduced into the United States at roughly the same time as discoveries were being made concerning calories, germs, and vitamins. Changing notions about sanitation, diet, and disease incorporated the newly available fruit, absorbing bananas into American myth and folklore as well as into scientific circles as both peril and panacea.

  Fresh fruit had a marginal place in the American diet in the nineteenth century. The adage that “fruit is golden in the morning, silver at noon, and leaden at night” led many cookbook and etiquette book writers to promote fruit as appropriate for breakfast.1 Before much was known about nutrition, some believed that “fruits do not take an important place as nutrients. They belong rather among the luxuries, and yet, as an agreeable stimulant to digestion, they occupy a front rank.”2 It was widely known that “fruits, when eaten under-ripe or over-ripe, disarrange the digestive organs.”3 The laxative properties of fruit were understood long before nutrition became a science.

  Maria Parola, the well-known housekeeping authority, assured her readers in 1882 that “fresh fruits are very necessary to perfect health. They must be ripe and sound to be entirely healthful. Unripe and decaying fruit causes a great amount of sickness and death every year in our large cities, where it is sold at low prices on the streets.”4 Apples, Parola suggested, were the most useful of fruits but “figs, dates, and bananas, either fresh or preserved, are very healthful, nutritious fruits.” Mrs. Lincoln, another contemporary cookbook author, suggested that fresh fruit could be “a great saving of time and work, give a pleasing variety to bills of fare, and be above all a great promoter of health, if people would use ripe fruit abundantly in its season at their tables (not between meals). With the markets bountifully supplied with many varieties of fruit, it is to be regretted that it cannot be found at every table at least once a day.”5 In response, Catherine Owen protested in The Homemaker that

  many good people speaking of the lack of thrift among the poor point to their neglect of fruit as a cheap and more wholesome food than meat. Cheaper I do not think it could be, except on the rare occasion of a glut in the market, for it will not take the place of all other things, and if a woman has but twenty-five cents for her dinner expenses, meat, vegetables, etc., she would find it difficult to squeeze more than a quarter of an orange, half a dozen grapes, or part of a banana for each person, unless meat be left out.6

  Owen went on to say that “bananas are sometimes very cheap, and they take the place of meat better than any other fruit, being it is said, very nutritious.”

  Nineteenth-century Americans believed that fruit was dangerous for young children. This belief, also prevalent throughout Europe, can be traced to Galen, a Greek physician of the second century A.D.7 Infantile diarrhea, frequent in the summertime, was a great killer and reinforced the fear of fresh fruit known to be a laxative. In 1867 American mothers were assured that this “prejudice arise[s] not from the injurious qualities of ripe sound fruit of any kind, but because children will not discriminate between that which is ripe and that which is nearly so, and because they are likely to eat fruits of all kinds to excess.”8 If children were to be served bananas, the fruit “should always be cooked, unless they are very ripe and the skins quite black.”9

  Other household arbiters held that children were not to eat fruit or fruit juice, other than orange juice, until after the age of two and a half. A young child’s diet should consist of “plenty of milk, a roasted potato once a day, oatmeal or some other simple cereal without sugar, a little beefsteak or bouillon or beef-juice three times a week, stale bread and plain crackers, which the average child under two years can safely eat, and know no longing after such doubtful articles as vegetables and fruits.”10 It is a wonder that so many people survived childhood.

  Forbidden fruit figured frequently in moral tales about children who were dishonest, stealing from an orchard or the table, and children spent their pennies on fruit, just as today they spend their allowance on candy. An 1885 editorial asked the New York City police to enforce the laws against street vendors who sold unripe and rotten fruit:

  The victims of this evil traffic are generally children, who in their eagerness for fruit and their ignorance of the danger in eating it when in an unwholesome condition, are liberal patrons, as long as their pennies last, of whatever unscrupulous vendors may offer that is within their means.… Children do not know that when one end of a banana, or one side of a melon, peach, or cherry is rotten, the whole of the article is unfit to be eaten, but the wretch who sells it does know and the policeman should.”11

  In her recollections of growing up in Maine in the 1890s, Mary Ellen Chase wrote of the cargo of a coastal schooner from New York: “Most remarkable of all her goods in those relatively fruitless days were crates of oranges, two kegs of white grapes, packed in sawdust, and—most wonderful to relate!—a huge bunch of bananas in a long, slatted frame.” Chase went on to say that “We were all excessively fond of them [bananas], but since they were tacitly recognized as an indulgence and since the price of them in the village store, at least of enough to supply our family, was prohibitive, we had never completely satisfied our desire.” The Chase children were the envy of the neighborhood for days. “I can yet feel the stilling of my heart when he [father] handed down to me, who waited below with outstretched apron, five, six, eight, twelve bananas, when he proposed that we should treat our friends.”12

  Selling bananas from a wagon, U.F. Report 1 (April, 1951).

  In the on-going debate as to when a banana was ripe and fit to eat, a 1916 newspaper article stated that

  children under three years of age do not chew their food thoroughly; they bolt it. For this reason they should not have bananas to eat uncooked. Bananas are nutritious, but they are an indigestible food unless they are well masticated. They are more easily digested when cooked than when eaten raw.”13

  A 1918 magazine article suggested that while the fruit should not be “the main component of the child’s dietary … can compete well with other fruits, and is decidedly to be preferred to candies.”14 An article in Scientific American pointed out that “a yellow banana is not necessarily a ripe banana and if consumed raw while it still has a green cast to the yellow color, as is frequently done by children on the streets, the availability of its carbohydrates is comparatively low and the effect on the child’s digestive system injurious.”15 Bananas were not to be eaten raw until flecked with brown “sugar” spots.

  One magazine writer suggested that the idea of indigestibility might have come from “the strange attraction which some children have for the inside of the peel, and for the long white strings of pulpy tissue which often adhere to the banana from the peeling,” and recommended scraping the banana before eating as the “strings” might not agree with everyone.16 A decade later an article in the Ladies Home Journal queried, “Do you know that the ‘strings’ sometimes left on peeled bananas are indigestible? This is why a banana which is to be eaten by a child should first be scraped.”17

  In the late nineteenth century, a major domestic reform movement swept the country that promoted the elevation of traditional household responsibilities to the status of a profession, in which all the new resources of s
cience and technology were applied to the improvement and more efficient management of the home.18 Many middle-class women adopted into their housework the new scientific principles, variously known as “scientific housekeeping,” “home science,” “progressive housekeeping,” and more widely, “domestic science.”19

  The late-nineteenth-century fairs provided opportunities to demonstrate and teach these new developments. During the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, proponents of the new domestic science ran a demonstration kitchen; it served lunches with menus that specified calculated food values to demonstrate to the public the meaning of the new terms “proteids, carbohydrates, calories, and the fact there are scientific principles underlying nutrition.”20

  The American Home Economics Association was founded in 1909 with initial research topics such as the digestibility of foods; calorie needs and the energy relationships of fat, protein, and carbohydrate; and the significance of inorganic elements in the body.21 During the next ten years, housewives were deluged with articles in newspapers and magazines about the relationship of nutrition and diet to health, and were exhorted to produce three “protective” meals a day for a healthy family. In the 1920s and 1930s research expanded to vitamins and minerals, especially iron, calcium, and the vitamins A, B, and C, with emphasis on the measurement of these nutrients in food and in the body. Most important of all were the recommendations for optimal growth and health.22

  In 1882 Robert Koch laid the basis for the germ theory of disease and furnished a rational basis for practical preventive measures.23 The identification of bacteria by Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch, and the discovery of the relationship of germs to disease, had initially led many physicians to believe that all disease was caused by germs.24 Wives and mothers found themselves responsible for the health of family members who might come upon deadly germs in the new indoor bathrooms or in the food they ate. The preface of one home economics textbook stated that:

  At present it is necessary for those expecting to become housewives to understand the elementary phases of a number of sciences, most prominent among which are chemistry and bacteriology. The relation of microorganisms to household affairs is now felt to be one of the most important phases of domestic science. The present work is designed for all interested in household affairs, including not only students in domestic science but all housewives who are interested in keeping their homes in the best and most healthful condition.25

  This connection of germs to disease was made more frightening by twentieth-century advertisers who dwelt on the dangers of unseen germs to sell everything from bananas to bathroom cleansers and refrigerators.

  The Food Value of the Banana, Research Department (Boston: United Fruit, 1928).

  To encourage nervous mothers to purchase bananas, promoters emphasized that the fruit came “with its own germ-proof wrapper.”26 Indeed, “a banana, properly handled is uncontaminated by dirt and pathogenic germs even if purchased from the pushcart in our congested streets.”27 An article in Good Housekeeping assured women readers that “nature has given us in the banana a sanitary, sealed package containing a food which includes all the elements of an ideal foodstuff.”28 The Ladies Home Journal warned that bananas should always be cut rather than torn from the bunch because “as long as the skin of a banana is unbroken it is a sterile food.”29 The American Medical Association also recommended bananas as “A Fruit in a Sterile Package,” citing the work of Dr. E. M. Bailey who had “made extensive bacteriologic examinations of the fruits in different stages of maturation.”30 In 1926 a pamphlet entitled “The Food Value of the Banana” noted that “the banana is hermetically sealed in its skin. This is an important health protection from dust, mould, flies, and dirty hands.”31

  American Medical Association seal of approval, Radio Bound for Banana Land, J. Mace Andress and Julia E. Dickson, Education Department (Boston: United Fruit, 1932), 3.

  The science of nutrition gained prominence during World War I when various food stuffs were rationed. As patriotic households were urged to give up meat and wheat on specified days, women needed to learn about alternative meal preparation. Bananas were promoted as a nutritious substitute even though they were not always readily available owing to loss of banana freighters to the war effort. Ten years later, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that prejudices about the digestibility of bananas “are gradually being broken down with the progress in the experimental study of nutrition,” and that bananas were now included even in infants’ diets.32

  Turn-of-the-century dietary standards were based on calorie levels and the balance of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Fruit and vegetables were not considered very important to a healthy diet. Dietary scientists estimated the number of calories needed to be consumed daily by men, women, and children, and began to test all food stuffs for their nutritional components. Standards were developed for people by age, sex, and activity. Homemakers were encouraged to count the calories for all the members of their families to be sure that each person ate the proper amount. The initial emphasis was upon eating a sufficient number of calories rather than worrying about consuming too many calories. Being underweight was perceived as more of a health threat than overweight. Large bananas have approximately a hundred calories each and were “regarded not as a fruit to eat casually but as a substantial food.33 The Journal of the American Medical Association noted that “it is well to bear in mind in the case of the banana that its caloric value is very high, in fact higher than that of any other common fruit in its natural state.”34 In 1929 the Education Department of United Fruit Company published the fifth edition of The Story of the Banana. The fruit was praised as

  one of the most convenient fruits to use. It may be readily served in many ways and its flavor blends agreeably with those of other fruits and foods. When combined with other fresh fruits and the leafy vegetables, it supplies the needed Calories. These facts are appreciated not only by housewives and hospital dietitians, but by those in charge of hotel dining rooms, restaurants and school cafeterias.35

  Food and medicine have been linked “ever since human beings began viewing ingestion and fasting as instruments of health and purity.”36 The discovery of vitamins confirmed the connection and the way people thought about food, giving it medicinal qualities. In 1906 an English chemist, Frederick Gowland Hopkins, studying deficiency diseases such as beriberi, scurvy, and rickets, suggested that some things the body might need were not present in certain foods. Four years later a Polish scientist named Casimir Funk called attention to “a group of indispensable nutritive complexes” in food stuffs.37 He called them “vitamines.” An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted in 1918 that a new physiology of foods was being created that “has emancipated the student of nutrition from the generalities of former days and enabled him to form more useful conceptions of the specific values of individual products.”38

  The term “vitamin” was coined in 1921, and the new substances were given letter names such as Vitamin A and Vitamin B.39 Information about the importance of vitamins in human diet and their correlation to disease changed the way in which people thought about food and meal planning. Fruit was considered an important source of vitamins and minerals in the new dietary science. An article in the American Journal of Public Health in 1927 reported on a study of bananas in cooperation with United Fruit Company. The study classed the banana as “an excellent source of vitamins A and C; a good source of Vitamin B; deficient in Vitamin D and not lacking in Vitamin E.” The researchers went on to report that “its potency in C, the availability and the relative cheapness of the fruit, make it a competitor with tomato juice and orange juice for use in infant feeding on vitamin basis alone. Its use will not, however, eliminate the necessity for cod liver oil or sunlight to avoid incidence of rickets.”40

  Readers of the Ladies Home Journal learned that “because of the quantity in which bananas may be eaten they are a good source of vitam
ins. This is why they are classed with other protective foods which have an important place in the diet.”41 In 1930 Parents Magazine looked back at a time when “the banana was the forbidden fruit that tempted children. Nowadays doctors frequently advise that boys and girls be given bananas before they have left their cribs. This is another evidence of the progress in nutrition based on scientific discoveries.”42 The American Medical Association approved bananas for advertising in the publications of the Association and for general promulgation to the public in 1931. The Committee on Foods approved the following statement as a basis of claims in the promotion and advertising of bananas:

  The banana is available at all seasons. Ripe bananas, or if cooked when partially ripe, are readily digestible even by infants and are valuable for modifying infant milk formulas because of the unique combination of readily assimilable sugars and vitamin C and are an aid against constipation. The vitamin and high carbohydrate content makes the banana a valuable supplement to milk, the mixture being a well balanced food. The carbohydrate contributes materially to the food energy value of mixtures of leafy vegetables and fruits. The final products of metabolism of the banana in the body are alkaline.43

  In 1935 an analysis of the banana published by United Fruit Company made the claim that the fruit “furnishes fuel, minerals (such as phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium and iron), and vitamins (A, B, C, and G), at very moderate cost.”44

  The growth in knowledge about public health in the early twentieth century led to public sanitation campaigns, such as street cleaning, and pure food and water supplies. (See Chapter 8 for a more detailed analysis of urban sanitation.) The new science of public health led to dramatic gains in the life expectancy of the people of the United States. Tuberculosis, the greatest killer in history, was a major social problem at the turn of the century as hundreds of thousands of Americans suffered from the disease with a death rate of 201.9 per 100,000 population. The new notions of germs, nutrition, and sanitation combined to provide the weapons in a campaign to eliminate tuberculosis. By 1942 the death rate had dropped to 43.1 per 100,000 and only 7.4 in 1948.45