There's Money in the Banana Stand
This is the 20th installment of 774: Weekly lessons from history about science, technology, and innovation.
Thank you for reading 774 these past 20 weeks! Writing this has been the highlight of my Saturdays. That being said, I’ll be decreasing the frequency of installments during the next few months as work will be getting busy. I hope you keep reading as I begin publishing on a biweekly basis!
Upcoming:
The Waffle House Index, et al
Moscow and Tijuana
Those (Strange) New Service Sector Jobs
The Yellow Brick Road
Coffee Shop Commerce
This Week:
There's Money in the Banana Stand
If you’ve ever played Mario Kart or watched Saturday morning cartoons there’s a good chance you’ve been left with the intuition that banana peels are dangerously slippery. The odd thing about this stereotype is that it doesn’t actually match up with any of the thousands of bananas that each of us has eaten over the years (the average 40 year old has eaten 10,000 bananas in their lifetime1). If you go to an Aldi and pull a bunch of bananas off the shelf, none of their skins will pose an existential danger to the stability of you or your vehicle.
Slippery bananas first gained notoriety as comedic killers in Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, “By the Sea,” where the early movie star slips on a banana peel he previously tossed on the ground. Chaplin didn’t just conjure up the idea that bananas were slippery. When “By the Sea” was made, bananas were much more slippery. This is because almost all bananas sold today are a different kind of banana than the ones your grandparents likely ate as children. Those bananas were called Gros Michael. Gros Michael dominated the banana market until the late 1940s. It was a creamier banana that had a much richer taste. Additionally, it had a very slippery peel.
Today nearly all commercially sold bananas, save the occasional plantain, are of the Cavendish variety. This transition from Gros Michael to Cavendish was not simply the result of the competition between different banana plantations or consumer preference. Gros Michael bananas don’t really exist anymore.2 They were destroyed in a blight that culminated in the 1950s. The blight, called Race One, crippled nearly all the plantations growing Gros Michael and destroyed the banana monopoly held by the United Fruit Company.
The United Fruit Company has a spotty history. Until it’s produce empire fell, it was a ruthless organization that would do anything to keep bananas cheaply flowing into the United States, up to and including bribing foreign officials and toppling Central American governments. The United Fruit Company began in 1899 thanks to a New Yorker named Minor Cooper Keith, who started a Costa Rican plantation, and a Boston based importer named Andrew Preston. The two would grow their operation into Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and many other countries. The company garnered the name “el pulpo,” the octopus, thanks to United Fruit’s tentacled spread into any area that banana trees could grow.
During the throws of the Cold War, a newly inaugurated John F. Kennedy gave permission to the CIA to conduct the Bay of Pigs invasion. The invasion, which aimed to sack Fidel Castro, failed miserably. JFK and the CIA would both go on to deny involvement, but history would not judge that denial well. While the U.S. involvement is widely known, a certain produce company has long escaped the ire of history for the hand that it played. In preparation for the invasion, the United Fruit Company equipped the CIA with two container ships to transport ammunition, men, and vehicles to the Bay of Pigs.3 This isn’t the only instance of geopolitical meddling by the company. In 1975, a United Fruit executive launched himself out of his office on the 44th floor of a building on Park Avenue in New York City. His suicide came after the revelation that he had pushed a $1.25 million bribe to the President of Honduras to leave a banana cartel that stood in opposition to United Fruit.4 United Fruit’s international manipulation of Central American Governments gave rise to the term “Banana Republic.”5 The shocking thing about Banana Republics is that they weren’t exactly uncommon. In 1911, The Cuyamel Fruit Company hired an entire mercenary army, led by General Christmas, to unseat the Honduran president and place their own man at the top. The Cuyamel Fruit Company was upset that the Honduran government had entertained giving a monopoly contract to their rival, The United Fruit Company, on Honduran bananas. The United Fruit Company and its competitors were a rather vicious organizations when compared to the wholesome goods they were peddling to American families. After the collapse of the Gros Michael crop worldwide, United Fruit never fully recovered.
The Cavendish, native to southern China, is the banana we have today. The Cavendish is a clone. Nearly every banana sold today is genetically the same as its neighbor on the shelf. This makes for efficient growth and familiarity for the consumer, but leaves today’s banana industry just as precariously positioned as it was in 1940. The danger is that there is currently a soil-borne fungus making its way across multiple continents and it only destroys one plant: banana trees. A local Malaysian newspaper referred to the blight as the “HIV of bananas.”6 The fungus, Tropical Race Four, leveled 70% of the banana acreage in Taiwan in the 1980s; it has decimated the supply in Australia and Indonesia. Luckily, Tropical Race Four has not yet made it’s way to Central America, but if it does, the entire supply of Cavendish bananas will face an extinction level event. The fact that Cavendish bananas are genetically identical only makes things worse. Without any genetic variance, the individual Cavendish is ill equipped to fight Tropical Race Four.7
The origin of the term “banana boat”:
Banana boat was a descriptive nickname given to fast ships (also called banana carriers) engaged in the banana trade, which were designed to transport easily spoiled bananas rapidly from tropical growing areas to North America and Europe. They often carried passengers as well as fruit.8
And an explanation by the U.S. Naval Institute:
In general, a warship makes about the worst freighter one can imagine, and destroyers are probably more ill-fitted for merchant service than anything except a submarine. Their hulls are shaped for extreme speed, not capacity. Their bulkheads are designed to resist flooding, not to facilitate the stowage of cargo, and their entire mode of construction is uneconomical by commercial standards.
For the banana trade in the 1920s and 1930s, however, there was a logical rationale for the use of destroyer hulls. They were big enough to carry a cargo of 25,000 stems of fruit and small enough to be operated by a crew of 19. (As warships they had carried upwards of 120 men.) Their fine hull lines permitted a speed of 16 knots even with a small, inexpensive diesel plant, and their shallow draft was suitable for navigating up Central American rivers, thus saving on rail transportation. Their speed was just enough to dispense with artificial refrigeration. Instead, a flow of air was forced into the holds through the big ventilators, and the combination worked out just right for the run from one of the Caribbean banana ports to New Orleans, Norfolk, or Miami. The fruit, when it was unloaded, had ripened just enough to make it ready for shipment to the retail market.9