OP-ED: How bananas conquered America
My spouse never fails to ask me what items to add to her shopping list. I always respond with “bananas.” While other produce languishes in the refrigerator fruit bin, bananas disappear faster than bagels or cookies. They are always calling my name from the counter space reserved for them, and I never disappoint.
To say that Americans take bananas for granted would be an understatement. No matter the season, we expect to find them piled high in the local supermarket. At convenience stores, fresh bananas are often displayed near the checkout.
According to the online business platform, Statista, last year we consumed over 9 billion pounds of bananas. The average American eats roughly 26.8 pounds of fresh bananas each year. Bananas remain the most purchased fruit by frequency and volume, making up about 1% of all grocery store sales in the country. It is the most heavily consumed fruit in the American diet.
The story of how bananas captured the American fruit market is fascinating. American innovation played an important role in moving the banana from a rare, exotic curiosity to the cheapest of all produce.
Before the Civil War, bananas were little known to consumers. Traders would throw some green bunches onto their schooner decks and hope to make it to New Orleans before the fruit ripened and spoiled. Northeastern ports were too much of a gamble. Bananas remained an expensive delicacy until the 20th century.
Three new technologies changed the game. Modern transportation via steamship and railroads, along with the invention of refrigeration, brought bananas to the masses. In 1903, with the launching of the S.S. Venus, the first refrigerated produce boat, a quarter-million pounds of bananas were imported from Latin America.
Almost all the bananas marketed in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe now come from Central America. However, the banana is not native to the Western Hemisphere. The Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia is the most likely center of origin. The western passage of the fruit was facilitated by the Portuguese in the late 15th century – from the Guinea Coast to the Canary Islands. From there, the Spanish brought the fruit to the Caribbean and Central America.
The biological nature of the banana is as unique as its history and its shape. The banana is unlike any other fruit. (It is actually a berry.) The plant lacks a wood trunk, making it a tree-size herb. It has a palm-like crown and a fleshy green stalk that grows to a height of between 20 and 40 feet.
In place of a root is a rhizome. Each female blossom becomes a single banana, then each cluster becomes a “hand,” and the massive bunch produces a “stem” of bananas. When this end is achieved, the cultivated plant is cut down, and a successor shoot takes over.
Banana picking and shipping are tricky businesses. They become edible only after leaving the mother plant. The sweetness and texture, valued by consumers, only occurs off the vine — and only if the fruit is plucked at the correct stage of maturity. Similar to strawberries, bananas are fragile and subject to rapid deterioration.
Philip Keep Reynolds, who wrote the classic profile, “The Banana: Its History, Cultivation and Place Among Stable Foods,” explains it best. “The necessity for infinite care in handling a bunch of bananas will be appreciated when it is realized that this fruit, when harvested, is practically a living organism. In the ripening process it generates heat within itself – a few degrees above or below normal may stimulate too rapid ripening or cause checked vitality.”
Because of this process, the proper environment of cool, moist, and circulating air must be maintained during shipment. Reynolds calculated that a 60,000-pound cargo of bananas generates the heat equivalent to burning a third of a ton of coal.
The discovery of ethylene gas and its relationship to bananas was the next breakthrough in transporting the product. A brief exposure to this gas is now used by suppliers to control the early ripening process. As we banana lovers know, the fruit continues to ripen on the store shelf. Forty percent of consumers prefer to eat bananas at the “green-tip stage.” Only 7% prefer the fully ripened banana.
Despite its popularity, the banana remains unloved, or at least ignored. Culinary praise (and expense) is more often reserved for the avocado, the mango, and the pomegranate. Thankfully, physicians and nutritionists take this odd fruit seriously.
The health benefits and nutritional value of the banana are impressive. This fruit supports heart health, digestion, and daily vitality. At 105 calories, a medium banana provides about 422 to 450 mg of potassium. Bananas contain 3 grams of dietary fiber. Their easily digestible carbohydrates provide a rapid, fat-free boost of natural energy before or after physical activity. Bananas offer vitamin B6 and tryptophan, an amino acid that your body converts into serotonin to help regulate mood and brain function. They are used to support weight loss because they’re relatively low in calories, nutrient-dense, and they’re filling.
One commentator has noted that bananas are a food for the whole of life. It is often the first solid food in an infant’s diet and the last solid food that can be managed by the elderly.
Then there are banana lovers like me who eat thousands of them during the long stretch in-between. I cannot imagine a morning without one.
Gary Stout is a Washington attorney.