[sirgawain33]

We don't eat bananas anymore in our house, largely for the reasons outlined in the article.

The thumbnail summary: bananas only started being widely consumed in the 1960s because of heavy marketing efforts by Central American railroad builders (they had to do something with the land along the sides of the newly built railroads, and bananas happened to fit).

They are heavily chemically treated, more than any other fruit. They've been a monoculture almost since Day 1.

Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'

I didn't find this article all that well written or informative. I recommend Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

I also happened to read John McPhee's Oranges at the same time. The contrast between the orange (an ancient fruit, widely consumed, hardy, with a rich literary tradition) and the banana is stark.

Both books, by the way, are great little studies in technology business. Techno-optimism, marketing, PR, globalization, manic CEOs; it's all there.

[bduerst]

I think you're making it out to be worse than it really is.

Bananas are heavily chemically treated with ethylene, an inert gas which causes plants to ripen faster and is harmless to humans.

(Fun fact: It's why bananas are never put next to other fruit in the supermarket, because they will cause other fruit to ripen and spoil faster.)

Bananas also haven't been a monoculture since day 1 either - but have been developed that way through centuries of selective breeding. The article outlines the monoculture problem quite well, but doesn't really mention that it's because the consumable plant [mostly] only reproduces asexually.

What's wrong with using tiny stickers on fruit for 'branding'?

[sirgawain33]

Haha, I am not an expert in the least. I would be happy to hear my evidence is bunk. I'm just trying to point toward a source that I found interesting and informative.

Indeed, with food production, the evidence and points of view are always very diverse and nuanced. It's a complex subject--endless, really.

Here's a clip about banana chemical treatment...

> "...Zemurray finally addressed the problem. He found a solution, which he called 'Bordeaux Mixture' and that combined copper sulphate, water, and lime. Zemurray's experts cautioned him against its overuse but he had it pumped on the plantations in increasing quantity. It was a cocktail with quite a pleasant name, but the giveaway was in the title of those employed to spray and pump it: veneneros, or for want of a better translation, 'poisoners'

I would be very interested to find out if the industry decreased the pesticide/fungicide load since this was documented. I'm quoting secondhand here, Chapman notes in the 2007 book

> Of the world's food crops, the banana is the most chemically treated (so we depend on its skin's ability to prevent disease)

The story of marketing bananas is such a strange one. The 'Father of Public Relations', Edward Bernays, was heavily involved. There isn't a compelling dietary reason to eat bananas (expect, I suppose, if it's the only thing you've got). They resorted to the same marketing tactics that were used to sell cigarettes.

> "Samuel Crowther...looking back on nearly twenty years later on these early days of United Fruit in his book The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics, what was being discovered was that 'demand is a thing which must be created" (51)

Without getting into too much of a discussion about health and diet... I find that the heuristic that "anything new is bad" seems to work pretty well with food. Trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, factory farms, etc.

The history of bananas shows that the production and demand for the fruit is both very new and completely artificial.

Again, please feel free to draw your own conclusions. The only point to make here is that I found the reading surprisingly fascinating -- a banana is not just a banana.

[makomk]

Bordeaux mixture's pretty nasty stuff, but it's been used on many types of fruits for a couple of centuries, not just bananas. It's also generally approved for use for use in organic growing so it's not easy to avoid - buying organic may actually increase the chance it was used on your fruit.

[Johnythree]

Bordeaux Mixture is relatively benign. Copper, Sulfur and Lime are all naturally occurring chemicals, which (as you say) have been used to fight fungus for hundreds of years.

Not all "chemicals" are evil.

[PhantomGremlin]

> Not all "chemicals" are evil.

A while ago Monsanto ran a series of condescending ads whose tagline was "without chemicals life itself would be impossible"

http://peterfeld.tumblr.com/post/51503279414/monsanto-ad-197...

[bduerst]

Hmmm, unless people are buying bananas and throwing them out, the demand for bananas is real and not artificial. It's a little surprising you group the crop with manufactured consumables like trans-fats and HFCS.

Bananas are one of the oldest agricultural crops known to man (8000 BC) - there's no reason to "go bananas" about them.

[pyre]

The parent is probably referring to the fact that banana demand in the US was manufactured artificially, much in the same way as DeBeers marketing has made the diamond synonymous with luxury, marriage, etc.

There was demand for bananas before, but mostly as a local crop.

[niemeyer]

Where's the data showing bananas are more heavily treated than any other fruit?

Here is some actual data from 2009, with analysis for Brazil by a proper agency (ANVISA's PARA, Project for Analysis of Agrotoxic Residue in Food):

http://portal.anvisa.gov.br/wps/wcm/connect/1424b98041ebbfb7...

It's in Portuguese, but you can find a nice color table in page 7 with fruit and vegetable names (rows) and states (columns) providing an idea (red == bad).

Bananas do better than pretty much anything else tested there.

[dragonwriter]

> Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'

Not even close. Craftsman's marks -- the original trademarks -- are pretty much the original form of branding, and predate banana stickers by by probably on the order of a couple thousand years.

[jacquesm]

Brand relates to an old Northern European word still in use today. Brand in Dutch and German means fire, the marks were burned into cattle, products and anything else that needed a hard to remove label.

[dragonwriter]

That's all true, but somewhat beside the point. Yes, that's the etymology, but most of those aren't examples of the meaning being discussed, but are instead owner's marks, rather than origin marks.

[pyre]

Yup. More related info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand#History