This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, Going Bananas: How a Tropical Treat Became the World’s Favorite Fruit, first released on May 13, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.
MAURICIO DIAZGRANADOS: This plant that we see here and these plants have changed the world in ways that are difficult to express in a single interview. From the landscapes, to the history of entire countries—to cultures, to the way in which we interact with nature. And have had effects all the way into, into the political systems of countries. And, and traces that are still with us.
NICOLA TWILLEY: Oooh, twenty questions time. What plant is this that has shaped basically everything? Cynthia, what’s my first clue?
CYNTHIA GRABER: I have a hint that might only work if you went to an American summer camp, and it is this chant slash song: I like to ite, I like to ite, I like to ite ite iplles and…
TWILLEY: Ummm…
GRABER: [LAUGHING]
TWILLEY: I did not grow up here, and your summer camp thing is not helping me. Truly, this is a foreign culture to me, I never even heard of a smore till I was in my 30s.
GRABER: Okay, then. How about this clue from the Minions movies—
[MINIONS SINGING]
TWILLEY: Ummm. Okay, I did not see the Minions movies but it sounds like the Beach Boys inhaled a helium balloon and what on earth does that have to do with a plant?
GRABER: Let’s try THIS clue: babies are often started on them as food, and they like to smash the fruit into their faces as they eat.
TWILLEY: Oh yeah, I have got this! It’s clearly the banana! What’s my prize?
GRABER: A Gastropod episode, all about bananas! That’s right, we are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber—
TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley, and this episode, we are going deep on the squishy yellow thing that is the number one most favorite fruit of humans and minions alike. So how *did* something so soft and bland that we feed it to babies shape entire landscapes and cultures?
GRABER: Why did we call countries in Latin America “banana republics?” And can you really slip on a banana peel?
TWILLEY: Plus, why are all the bananas in the store identical? Where are all the other kinds of bananas? They must be out there somewhere!
GRABER: This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of science, technology, and economics. Gastropod is part of the vox media podcast network, in partnership with Eater.
[MUSIC]
DIAZGRANADOS: Welcome to the tropics. We are now inside the conservatory of the New York Botanical Garden. Just a few steps behind us, we left the winter of New York, and now we are among palms, and ferns, and orchids, and warm weather.
TWILLEY: A couple months ago, Cynthia and I met up in the Bronx to visit some bananas. With Maurico Diazgranados who is the Chief Science Officer at the New York Botanical Garden.
DIAZGRANADOS: So let’s, let’s, walk and explore the conservatory.
TWILLEY: [LAUGH] I’m banana spotting.
DIAZGRANADOS: We’re just walking around trying to find our bananas here.
GRABER: We peeked through all the greenery in the conservatory until we found a banana plant, it was one stalk growing straight up, taller than either of us, with enormous leaves draping off the stalk.
DIAZGRANADOS: So… can you see over there that there’s a huge banana? That’s called the Musa Hua Moa banana.
TWILLEY: This is a Polynesian variety originally, though these days you can sometimes find it in South Florida and Hawaii. Apparently as well as being a big plant, it also has unusually large fruit that are very delicious and creamy. Sadly, the tree we were looking at was fruit free. And it wasn’t really a tree.
DIAZGRANADOS: So what you can see as a stem is not really a stem. It’s a pseudo-stem, that is formed by the bases of the leaves that are grown very close to each other. So there’s no wood here. And if you think about, oh, well this is a banana tree, well, they are not trees. They are just herbs.
GRABER: Herbs are defined as non-woody plants, they have smooth, flexible stems.
DIAZGRANADOS: And, and they are very soft actually, inside, because it’s just leaves.
GRABER: If that’s not weird enough, the fruit that in the supermarket is usually pretty large is actually more related to what we’d think of as something pretty tiny.
DIAZGRANADOS: The bananas are berries. That’s how they are classified.
TWILLEY: I know. And while your mind is already blown into a million tiny pieces, I’m just going to point out that the top sort of tab that you use to peel open the banana? Yeah, that’s the bottom when the banana is growing. It is a topsy turvy world, what can I say.
GRABER: But one thing may not surprise you listeners, and it’s how big a deal bananas are. I mean, I can’t even imagine any grocery store or corner bodega or airport convenience store without them. They’re such a big deal that Dan Koeppel wrote an entire book about them called, yes, Banana!
DAN KOEPPEL: Bananas are America’s favorite fruit. Sells more than apples and oranges put together. In the world of the kitchen table, the banana is *the* fruit. It’s indispensable.
TWILLEY: And Americans are not alone in their love affair with bananas. Bananas are the fourth largest crop in the world, right up there after much more staple seeming foods like wheat, rice and corn.
DIAZGRANADOS: Banana, in fact, is the most consumed fruit in the world. It’s a herb, so it grows fast. It’s delicious. It’s simple. It’s easy. You just peel it and eat it.
GRABER: And we love it so much that it’s one of the earliest plants we domesticated. It was domesticated around the same time as potatoes and beans, and based on the current evidence, it seems like we domesticated bananas before we domesticated rice and corn.
TWILLEY: Like for most of our crops, the domestication process required a lot of optimism or maybe just extreme hunger on the part of our ancestors because if you met a wild version of a banana today you wouldn’t necessarily consider it a delicious dinner option.
KOEPPEL: They are tiny, maybe the size of your thumb. They have very hard seeds in them. They’re not inedible. I mean, I’ve seen birds eating them. It’s just a lot of work to get a substantial amount of fruit from them.
ANTHONY RODRIGUEZ: Yes, this is a wild species called Musa velutina.
GRABER: Anthony Rodriguez is a photographer and enthnobotanist and he’s working on a book project about banana species around the world. He showed us a photo of a wild banana he’d tried when he traveled to Papua New Guinea. The banana in his photograph is not what I would expect—it’s small like Dan says, and it’s almost fuschia colored.
RODRIGUEZ: It’s pubescent, meaning it has a fur, or a hairy—it’s hairy. It’s a bright pink,
TWILLEY: The actual fruit inside this furry pink peel is just a normal creamy white color, sadly, but it has huge seeds that look like they could easily chip your tooth.
RODRIGUEZ: Well, people don’t eat these. When I was there, people was like, why are you eating monkey banana?
GRABER: I can understand, because if you don’t have a good dentist on hand, eating that sounds like a not great idea. So what was it about wild bananas that was so appealing to ancient humans?
KOEPPEL: There’s two real hypotheses and you know, people tend to argue like, which is right, actually the truth is probably both are right.
TWILLEY: The first hypothesis bypasses the fruit altogether in favor of something called the corm.
KOEPPEL: The corm is the bulb at the bottom of the banana. And that’s the part that you would dig outta the ground, carry over to your hut, and stick in the ground. And a year, two years, three years later, you have a banana tree. The corm is also edible. It’s not delicious, but it can be made into a sort of goo. And people love to eat goo, especially when they’re starving. So. You know, that’s one possibility.
GRABER: So in one theory, maybe people first started domesticating banana plants specifically for their corms, not the fruit. And then they found some random seedless bananas. Another theory is that they weren’t domesticating the banana plant at all, they were just occasionally foraging the corm or the fruit, and then they came across a lucky accident.
KOEPPEL: Probably, somebody found a mutated banana, that didn’t have seeds in it. And because bananas can grow this alternate way by sticking them in the ground, somebody probably said, let’s give this a try.
TWILLEY: If those early humans had said, hmm, this banana is actually quite nice—let me take one of the new shoots that’s attached to a piece of corm and plant it—then it would grow into another genetically identically banana plant. So you’d end up with more seedless bananas for the win.
GRABER: Which is obviously what you’d have to do with these new seed-free bananas to keep them seed-free. But out there in the big wide world today, there are a lot of different kinds of seed-free bananas. And so, two things: this domestication probably happened a lot over thousands of years, that people found random seed-free ones and saved them. Also, out of thousands of banana clones, sometimes genetic changes still appear and then people would save those new varieties, too.
TWILLEY: Wild bananas originally came from all over South Asia and Southeast Asia and Polynesia, but the earliest archaeological evidence we have of domesticated bananas comes from Papua New Guinea. Anthony told us there are thousands of different banana varieties to be found there today.
RODRIGUEZ: Each particular variety has its own name, you know, local name, and they all have their purposes. A lot of them even have purposes for rituals and things of that sort.
TWILLEY: Some are more starchy and savory, we’d call those plantains today. And some are sweeter and softer like the dessert bananas we get in the store.
GRABER: But all these bananas were originally so delicious and filling and so easy to grow and eat that they quickly spread around the world.
KOEPPEL: Pretty much at the same pace that people did. You know, when the banana shows up in a place like Tanzania, for example, which is probably where it showed up in Africa, it’s because people came from Asia, in boats, and grew their bananas there. Bananas are portable. I could literally pull out a banana root or corm out of a banana tree somewhere, put it in my garage for four years, and still stick it in the ground and get a banana tree.
TWILLEY: Some of the earliest bananas arrived in Africa as much as 3,000 years ago. And they quickly became central to African cuisine and culture too.
GRABER: Just like in Papau New Guinea, there are so many different kinds of bananas in countries including Tanzania and Uganda today. There’s the kind you eat when twins are born, and another you’re supposed to eat when you bury a relative. There’s a banana to eat when you’re worried your spouse is cheating. You can make bananas into beer. And of course, you eat them at any and every time of the day.
KOEPPEL: So this is an amazingly durable and important source of calories. And even today, it remains the primary source of calories in many countries in Africa.
TWILLEY: But these are not the bananas on our supermarket shelves. Because the banana still had miles to go.
GRABER: Bananas ended up on the Canary Islands, which are off the coast of Africa and were stopping points for Spain and Portugal during the age of exploration. And so Europeans picked up some handy bananas and their corms for their travels when they stopped off in the Canaries and carried those bananas to the Caribbean.
TWILLEY: So the banana had reached the Americas, but not yet America—because, it’s tropical. It grows near the equator and the fruit itself is soft and squishy when it’s ripe. So *it* doesn’t actually travel very well.
KOEPPEL: The banana before the industrial revolution, before 1870 or so, is an exotic tropical fruit. They were rare and they didn’t keep well. So very few people had tasted a banana.
TWILLEY: At least, very few Americans.
GRABER: The first recorded bananas that made it to New York City got there in 1804, they were Cuban Reds. They’re small and plump and kind of reddish purple. These bananas from Cuba occasionally made it up the coast before they went bad, and they were really expensive, like 10 bucks a pop in today’s money. That’s not per bunch, it’s per banana.
TWILLEY: So bananas were really a one-off thing, super rare, until a Cape Cod ship captain called Lorenzo Dow Baker turned to bananas to try to make a quick buck after a disastrous expedition to Venezuela in search of gold.
KOEPPEL: Well, they don’t find any gold. And so he limps back, you know, some of his crew haven’t made it. His boat’s in bad shape. And he’s, he’s feeling pretty bummed about the whole thing. And, he gets to Jamaica. Where he puts in for repairs. And in Jamaica he sees and eats these bananas. And he thinks, man, I’ve got to salvage this trip somehow. Maybe I’ll try to bring these bananas back to port, in the United States, and see if I can sell them. Completely crazy idea. I mean, this is a sailboat, so. Maybe he didn’t know how long—how well bananas keep, but he puts them at the front of the boat. And sails into this chill wind. And somehow, the bananas survive the journey. And he sells them right there, on the dock in New Jersey. And people like them. And so, he’s thinking: Maybe I did find gold. Let’s try this again.
GRABER: Within a year, Baker’s bananas were big bucks. He ended up kicking off a mini banana craze in the US.
TWILLEY: But the banana was still a little exotic and maybe even intimidating to the genteel Christians of New England and the Mid Atlantic.
KOEPPEL: The shape of the banana is suggestive, let’s say. You don’t need to do much to prepare a banana in real life, but in, in a buttoned up Victorian world, you need to disguise the banana. It cannot look phallic. And so the recipes are not really like, banana cream pie or banana pudding. They’re: how to cut and present bananas, and wrap them in ways that are not suggestive.
GRABER: These carefully repackaged bananas also were still expensive, and really only for the elite. But then Baker teamed up with another New England guy named Andrew Preston. Preston wanted to make them cheap, and that meant that they had to import a LOT of bananas.
TWILLEY: And fortunately, at exactly that moment in history, a technology came along that made transporting bananas in bulk possible. Yes, it’s my old favorite, refrigeration! Also, steamships. A steamship could make a three week journey from the Caribbean in under two, and putting big blocks of ice in the hold stopped the bananas from ripening en route.
GRABER: This turned a gamble—would the winds be at your back so you could make it before the bananas all rotted?—it turned it into a sure thing. And bananas started to get big.
TWILLEY: The only trouble was, there weren’t enough of them to satisfy this growing demand. The story of how the banana business took over Central America, after the break.
[BREAK]
GRABER: So when the ice-cooled ships belonging to Baker and Preston’s company docked in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, the people selling their bananas were all small-scale farmers. A lot of them were also formerly enslaved. They were growing for their own food and the local market, and they were happy to sell bananas to the guys on the boats sailing back to America.
TWILLEY: At the time, thanks in large part to colonialism, countries in the Caribbean and Latin America in general were very poor. But they saw the US and Europe industrializing and developing railroads and steam-powered factories and they wanted some of that too.
BEN BRISBOIS: It was a time when a lot of governments were trying to modernize in Central America. And that often involved dreams of a railroad.
GRABER: Ben Brisbois is a public health professor at the University of Montreal and author of the new book Banana Capital: Science and Poison at the Equator.
TWILLEY: In order to achieve their dreams of railroads without spending money they didn’t have, the solution Central American countries came up with was to give away huge chunks of land to tempt American entrepreneurs into building infrastructure for them.
GRABER: One of those American entrepreneurs was named Minor Keith. His uncle built a railroad in Chile and then he built railroads in Peru, and he invited his nephew Minor to Costa Rica to oversee the construction of the railroad there in 1871.
BRISBOIS: And so Minor Keith was given a large portion of the country, essentially, in exchange for building a railroad. And so that enabled him to build the railroad, but also to start planting bananas on the side of the track. With the workers. And so that was initially the workers he had brought in, especially from Jamaica.
TWILLEY: Who already liked eating bananas and knew how to grow them. Which was helpful
KOEPPEL: He has this jungle. He says, what am I going to do with that? Well, he has another problem. He has to feed his workers. Well, what’s easy to grow? Bananas. So he starts growing bananas on the side of the railroad to feed his workers at first.
DIAZGRANADOS: And suddenly he found himself rather than managing this project of the railroad, becoming the CEO of a corporation trading bananas.
GRABER: It took 20 years to build the railroad, but by this point Baker and Preston had their banana company, Boston Fruit, up and running with those handy refrigerated ships. And they were looking for a source of a LOT of bananas. And guess what, that’s just what Keith was growing on all that land.
TWILLEY: And the company that was born when Keith joined forces with Boston Fruit? You’ll have heard of it, because still to this day most bananas in the store are from this company. Nowadays it’s called Chiquita—back then, it was called United Fruit.
BRISBOIS: And because it was so big, it was able to eat up a lot of competitors.
GRABER: This point in time, this moment when Keith formed his plantations and the bananas were shipped on Preston and Baker’s boats: this turned the banana from a crop that people farmed, lots of different kinds, on a small scale—it had become an industrial product grown at scale on a plantation. All the bananas were one kind: the Gros Michel.
KOEPPEL: It is a tougher banana. It’s much easier and cheaper to ship. It ripens much more evenly and a little more slowly. So generally it’s ship-ability and its toughness, is what makes it so important.
TWILLEY: In the 1880s, Americans on the East Coast could choose between multiple different kinds of expensive bananas: little, big, red, green, fat, thin. In the 1890s, they could only get the Gros Michel, a plump yellow banana. But, they paid a lot less for it.
GRABER: This was also the moment that Central America was becoming completely transformed. Enormous tracts of forest were totally cut down, wetlands were drained. Workers were transported from islands or from other rural areas to work on these plantations. Companies built huge towns for their workers in the middle of the forests. Everything changed.
TWILLEY: That was for growing all the bananas, but to get this vast quantity of bananas to the US—that called for the invention of the cruise ship.
KOEPPEL: One of the most important efficiencies that United Fruits had was to use white ships. White ships stay cooler because white is going to reflect the sun. And so their fleet became known as the Great White Fleet.
VOICEOVER: For many years, these fascinating tropical countries have been served by United Fruit Company’s Great White Fleet. These lands are principally agricultural, and their combined population is actually less than the population of New York City.
KOEPPEL: Again, this is a low margin business, so: what are you going to do with these boats? There’s, you can’t—there’s nothing you’re going to bring down to Central America, except people. And so they invent these ships that are cargo ships. Cooled by ice. So these are the first air conditioned cool cruise ships.
GRABER: And while vacation might have been a seasonal thing for the handful of Americans wealthy enough to cruise to the Caribbean and Latin America, bananas made their way north on these white cruise ships all year round. This additional revenue stream helped make bananas even cheaper and more ubiquitous in the US.
TWILLEY: But to become a BIG big thing, for the banana to be the cheapest and most popular fruit in the entire land—that took some marketing sparkle.
KOEPPEL: For example, to reduce the taboo effect of bananas, United Fruit publishes hundreds of thousands of postcards featuring proper ladies eating bananas. And this makes the world safe for bananas.
TWILLEY: Thanks to the good work of the advertising men, bananas were not just safe, they were bursting with health and nutrition.
SPELLACY: One thing that was appealing was that bananas were in a germ free wrapper.
TWILLEY: This is Amy Spellacy, a professor at NYU who teaches a class on bananas.
SPELLACY: The banana came with its own packaging, the outside peel that kept the fruit clean.
GRABER: United Fruit hired doctors to convince mothers that bananas were great as baby food. These marketers are also the ones who came up with the idea of slicing bananas into newly popular breakfast cereal.
VOICEOVER: Rich in minerals and vitamins, this great American fruit is the familiar commodity in the markets of the world.
WOMAN: At breakfast, for example, sliced bananas and cereal. At 10:00 AM, a slice of banana bread, or banana nut bread, makes an appetizing morning snack with a glass of milk.
VOICEOVER: School cafeterias, meticulous in providing balanced lunches for children, report bananas among the most popular and best-liked of all fruits.
GRABER: And they tried to convince adults to eat bananas in all sorts of ways.
SPELLACY: So they created all these cookbooks to sort of promote banana consumption. You know, we look at them now, some of them sound appealing. Some of them sound really gross.
TWILLEY: Anyone for banana meatloaf? No?
SPELLACY: They were really promoting this idea of cooking bananas, broiling bananas.
WOMAN: 6:30 means supper and a fine broiler meal, indoors or out, is the banana mixed grill.
SPELLACY: They, they show bananas as a side dish with ham and eggs. Baked bananas. Banana scallops, where you sort of dip the bananas in breadcrumbs and cook them in a frying pan.
WOMAN: Cooking time? Only two minutes.
GRABER: All of this banana propaganda was working. Bananas caught on – and not just in the kitchen, but in popular culture, too.
SINGER: Oh, yes! We have no bananas. We have no bananas today! [MUSIC]
TWILLEY: You may think a new Taylor Swift or Beyonce song is a big deal today. Let me tell you, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” would have blown them out of the water. This song was released in 1923, and it was a sensation. The New York Times ran an article trying to figure out why, quote, “97.3 percent of the great American nation was singing Yes We Have no Bananas.”
GRABER: They couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer to that question, and nobody really knows what this song about a fruit vendor means, but there was literally a 10-piece banana band that toured the country playing this song. Even the sheet music flew off the shelves.
VENDOR: Who asked you for bananas anyway? Who asked you? I only want a hot dog sandwich. Hot dogs are better than bananas, I always say, ain’t it?
SINGERS: Oh, yes! We have no bananas. We have no bananas today!
TWILLEY: That particular song was pretty PG, even if it was supposedly making fun of an immigrant fruit vendor’s shaky grasp of English. But despite the advertisers best efforts, the banana had never fully let go of its saucy side. Other hit banana tunes of the 1920s and 30s included I’ve Never Met a Straight Banana, and this raunchy little number, Banana in Your Fruitbasket.
BO CARTER: I got a brand new skillet, I got a brand new lead; All I need is a little woman, just to burn my bread. And I’m tellin’ you baby, I sure ain’t going to deny; let me put my banana in your fruit basket, then I’ll be satisfied…
GRABER: Speaking of risque bananas, Josephine Baker was a famous African-American dancer and singer who lived in Paris. She was super cool and by the way also ended up spying for the Allies during World War II. But in the 20s she performed at a club wearing only a beaded necklace and a skirt made of plastic bananas.
TWILLEY: Josephine was just the first in a long line of quote unquote “exotic” beauties associated with the banana. The most famous was probably the movie star Carmen Miranda.
SPELLACY: She was Brazilian, but represented various Latin American characters in these films. Always in her signature exotic costume with fruit piled on her head.
GRABER: Carmen Miranda was a singer and a samba dancer, but she really became famous when she started starring in Hollywood movies. A big one was a musical called the Gang’s All Here, and she sang with a troupe of ladies holding giant bananas and there was a bunch of bananas perched on her head.
CARMEN MIRANDA: Some people say I dress too gay; but every day, I feel so gay! And when I’m gay, I dress that way; Is something wrong with that? No! [SINGING] Americanos tell me that my hat is high; because I will not take it off to kiss a guy. But if I ever start to take it off, ay, ay! Ay, ay! I do that once for Johnny Smith; and he is very happy with! The lady in the tutti-frutti hat!
TWILLEY: Carmen Miranda’s tutti frutti hat wasn’t sponsored by the banana companies. But they saw it, liked it, and promptly ripped it off.
SPELLACY: She’s used as the inspiration for Chiquita Banana. When you look at an image of Chiquita banana, she’s an actual banana. Her body is the banana, and she has, you know, a skirt that sort of mimics the costume of Carmen Miranda, and the hat with the fruit piled on top.
TWILLEY: Like her inspiration, Ms. Chiquita was an absolute icon and as she shimmied around topless in her fruit headdress, she continued the good work of helping make Americans feel comfortable with this tropical fruit. She told Americans how to know when to eat bananas…
CHIQUITA BANANA: [SINGING] I’m Chiquita Banana and I’ve come to say; bananas have to ripen in a certain way. And when they’re flecked with brown and have a golden hue, bananas taste the best and are the best for you!
GRABER: And in another commercial Ms. Chiquita tells people how bananas can help them out with their love life.
SPELLACY: There’s a young woman at home. It’s all, it’s a cartoon, right? She’s sitting at home sad, that she can’t, get the attention of any young men.
GIRL: Unhappy day. Why don’t they ever give me a tumble?
CHIQUITA BANANA: [SINGING] I’m Chiquita banana and I come to say; to a fellow’s heart his stomach is the way. It’s an ancient formula you must admit; and we’ll put it to the test with a banana split!
SPELLACY: And the young men come running, and Chiquita, sort of—has shown her, you know, the path to a young man’s heart is through preparing a banana split.
GUY 1: Oh I think I see a beauty-
GUY 2: Now you’re talking- she’s a honey!
GUY 3: How’d we miss her?
GUYS: [TOGETHER] And her banana splits are something—they make me wanna kiss her!
GIRL: Now, don’t be fresh!
TWILLEY: Even though you might think that Ms. Chiquita, as a topless, confident, and very chic tropical beauty, could be a little threatening to Ms. Average American Housewife, Amy says that wasn’t the case at all. She was more like a BFF.
SPELLACY: There’s one where she is… she shows up and she’s sort of like, a coach and a mentor to a tired American housewife who’s at home ironing. And she’s sad and she’s depressed. She’s kind of sagging over the ironing board and Chiquita Banana dances in and encourages her to sort of take care of her appearance, eat more fruits and vegetables. She shows her how to prepare a banana salad.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: Good morning ladies! Do you feel miserable? Does your back ache? Are your poor feet tired? What you need is—
CHIQUITA BANANA: [SINGING] I’m Chiquita Banana and I’ve come to say that you really shouldn’t get yourself run down this way! You must have nutrition and to get it right, you should really eat some fruit each morning, noon and night. You’ll find by eating fruits you’ll have more beautiful appearance and complexion. The Mother Nature Beauty treatment… to help you look perfection!
WOMAN: Indeed you’re right!
TWILLEY: There’s something kind of wrong about a banana encouraging more banana consumption…? But we’ll leave that to one side for now.
GRABER: But in general, all of this is a huge success, everyone’s eating bananas—and, oops, they’re tossing the peels on the ground.
KOEPPEL: And this popularity goes so crazy that a problem begins to develop. What is the nature of the crisis? It’s not just rotting stinking fruit peels, it’s that a rotting stinking banana peel is slippery. And people start slipping on them and getting hurt. Now I know nobody believes this is true.
TWILLEY: Today, it does seem unlikely, I agree. But there are two things to bear in mind. One, the Gros Michel banana was known to have a particularly slippery skin. And two, a banana that has been lying on the ground for long enough to rot really is pretty slippery. And just in case you’re still skeptical, take it from Dan, it is possible!
KOEPPEL: And this sounds like a total lie, but it is true. I actually did slip on a banana peel when I was young and broke my elbow. So. [LAUGH] In New York, on 23rd Street.
GRABER: Dan’s banana fall is rare today, but clearly it was a serious problem back then.
KOEPPEL: And if you look at things like the Boy Scout manuals from those days. Boy Scouts are supposed to do one good deed a day. And one of the suggested deeds was, go around your neighborhood and pick up banana peels. Not orange peels, not fruit peels. Banana peels. Cities begin to issue ordinances against discarding banana peels. St. Louis has one. People will be fined if they throw a banana peel on the ground.
GRABER: This was a success, and city sidewalks became cleaner—
KOEPPEL: Once it no longer becomes a serious matter, it becomes a laughing matter. And so the slip on the banana peel begins to emerge in silent movies right there along with the throwing of the pie and— [LAUGH] You know, the keystone cops. And it becomes a huge gag.
TWILLEY: And meanwhile, all of this exotic dancing and slapstick comedy is just cementing the romance that Americans are having with bananas. We could not get enough of them.
KOEPPEL: So the popularity of bananas is what directly leads to the expansion of bananas. The expansion of bananas leads to more popularity. And so on and so on. Until literally, central America is controlled, from top to bottom, by United Fruit, by the banana companies.
GRABER: And this control of Central America—this is where the banana story takes a turn. No more fun and games and banana hats. It’s time to meet the banana’s dark side, after the break.
[BREAK]
KOEPPEL: You know, anybody who wants to understand how the banana industry worked needs to listen to that song, Day-O.
SINGER: Daaaay-O! Daaaay-O. Daylight come, and me want to go home.
KOEPPEL: The lyrics of the song are “me work all night and drink the rum…”
SINGER: Work all night, and I drink the rum!
CHORUS: Daylight come and me want to go home…
KOEPPEL: “Hey, Mr. Tallyman, tally me, banana. Me chop bananas till the morning come.”
SINGER: Stack banana till the morning come!
CHORUS: Daylight come and me want to go home.
SINGER: Come, Mister Tallyman, tally me banana…
CHORUS: Daylight come, and me want to go home.
KOEPPEL: This is a description of how banana work, worked. When banana workers were—they were waiting for the white ships to come. They would stand and look out on the horizon. And these ships would approach. And, begins this frenzy of chopping bananas, all night long, fueled by rum. And, you know, when daylight comes, the bananas are chopped down and these ships are quickly loaded, because bananas are perishable.
CHORUS: Six foot, seven foot, eight foot, bunch! Daylight come and me want to go home…
KOEPPEL: So this whole thing happens very rapidly. And then the guys have to get paid by the tallyman, who literally counts bananas. Because you’re paid by the piece.
SINGER: Come, Mister Tallyman, tally me banana…
CHORUS: Daylight come, and me want to go home.
TWILLEY: Life for the workers on a United Fruit plantation was not as glamorous or fun as Carmen Miranda and Ms. Chiquita made bananas seem. The workers lived in company-built housing in the middle of the cut down jungle. Malaria and tuberculosis were common. They worked nonstop during the banana harvest. They spent up to half their salary on food sold to them by the company. There were snakes and spiders—it was grim.
GRABER: So the companies clearly weren’t treating their workers well. But they also weren’t treating the countries they worked in well. Because they basically tried to run the governments, too. And the person who kind of perfected this playbook was a man named Samuel Zemurray—he was later known as Sam the Banana Man. He got his start on the Gulf Coast in the US.
KOEPPEL: He is an immigrant. A poor immigrant from Bessarabia. And he’s a, a peddler. He carries stuff on his back, pots, pans, anything people need. And one of the things he begins to do is take overripe bananas—slightly overripe bananas that the markets won’t sell—and he sells them as seconds.
TWILLEY: From this humble beginning, Sam got going in bananas. He started a banana company, bought up someone else’s railroad concession on the north Coast of Honduras in 1905 and began shipping fruit north.
GRABER: Sam had a great deal in Honduras, it was a poor country and in return for his investment, they weren’t charging him tariffs on exporting his bananas. But after just a couple of years, there was a new president in Honduras. And because the government was in debt, he was about to strike a deal with the US government to allow an American bank, JP Morgan, to collect tariffs.
TWILLEY: Sam was pretty sure that JP Morgan was going to raise his tariffs, and he wasn’t excited about that.
BRISBOIS: And so Zemurray actually worked with a Honduran general, and some unsavory characters he gathered up in New Orleans.
KOEPPEL: And they hatched this plot to secretly take a boat to Honduras and take over the country. Sounds crazy, but somehow they actually managed to do this. And so within six weeks, Sam Zemurray is now the—basically the un-crowned king of Honduras.
GRABER: This was great for Sam, he could install a new president, amd now say go jump in a lake to JP Morgan and not have to pay those tariffs. But all that wasn’t enough, he also wanted access to a lot more land.
KOEPPEL: So Zemurray, who was a blunt force kind of guy, in a world of blunt force kind of guys, burns down some city halls, destroying the property records. So nobody owns that land anymore. So Sam can step in and take it.
TWILLEY: This was criminal as well as immoral, but also kind of standard behavior for banana guys at the time. The only real difference in this specific coup was that a fruit company guy was going against the US government. Normally, the two forces—big banana and Uncle Sam—they operated hand in hand.
GRABER: Because America saw these companies as kind of an extension of our own governmental influence in the region. And when I say influence, it’s more than that.
BRISBOIS: Latin America was seen as sort of a treasure trove of resources just waiting to be made productive by American interventions. By American, you know, men of science and business. And so these attitudes allowed the US to justify intervening in Latin America when there were things like, for example, restive workers or strikes.In aid of hospitable government allies or potentially in opposition to, to other governments that were less welcoming to American business interests.
TWILLEY: Sometimes guaranteeing American business interests took force. Other times it just took carefully distributed cas. But either way, from the 1890s, the banana companies basically ran the show, backed up with the threat of US military action.
KOEPPEL: Because these are third world countries. Many of them have weak governments, if any government at all. There’s a lot of money to be spread around. And so starting around 1894, the very first interventions on behalf of the banana companies—sometimes by private armies, sometimes by US armies—begins. And the purpose of these interventions is exclusively to secure land and labor for the banana companies, at the lowest possible cost. Except the cost to human life.
GRABER: And at times, that human cost was shockingly high.
DIAZGRANADOS: In Colombia, we, we had one of the most difficult times in, in bananas history. And that is called what we remember as the massacre of the banana plantations.
TWILLEY: In 1928, tens of thousands of workers on the United Fruit plantations near Cienaga, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia went on strike.
KOEPPEL: They’re going on strike for basic things: better hours, healthcare, bathrooms. And. United Fruit decides that it has to do something. That they are desperately afraid of this sort of, like, imaginary domino. That if Cienega and that region of Columbia falls, so will the rest of the nation. And from there, the banana industry’s entire business model will have the rug pulled out from under it. They’ll have to treat people decently.
GRABER: And of course they didn’t want to treat people decently, the way the banana industry was set up was that bananas had to be as cheap as physically possible. And the Colombian elites were making money on bananas too, so it wasn’t like they were on the side of the workers. So when the US put pressure on the Colombian government, they had no problem declaring martial law.
TWILLEY: But the workers held firm, the strike wasn’t going anywhere. Until one day in December that year. It was a Sunday, and hundreds of banana workers had just attended mass with their wives and children. Then they gathered in the central square of Cienaga to hear a speech from the local governor.
GRABER: The Colombian army had placed soldiers with machine guns at all four corners of the square. They told the workers they had five minutes to disperse. But they couldn’t, they were packed together in the square. And so the soldiers opened fire on them.
DIAZGRANADOS: With the support of the arm of the Colombian government, the army killed many hundreds of these protesters. Some books say that more than 1,000 people were killed just in one place, as they were leaving the church.
TWILLEY: Some say it was as many as double that.
DIAZGRANADOS: And that was not just the workers, but also their wives and the children. Everybody was killed. So, that initiated even more violent protests to fight for their rights. And that is a dark chapter of Colombian history.
TWILLEY: Because not only was that massacre completely horrific, it actually started Colombia down a really dark path.
DIAZGRANADOS: The outcome of those was the realization in that moment, at least in Colombia, that protesters needed to find other ways. To, fight for their rights and for more humane conditions. And ended up with supporting social movements that were controlled even more violently by the government. Until the famous date of 1948, where, the main candidate for the presidency of Colombia, Jorge Elias Sergaitan, was killed just a week before the elections. And that was the official beginning of the Colombian guerrillas.
GRABER: The ripple effect from this banana massacre—it had an impact all the way through to the Colombian civil war that lasted for more than half a century, and led to the deaths of more than 200,000 people. It didn’t come to an end until 2016.
DIAZGRANADOS: So since 1948, the country, Colombia, my country, has been living with a continuous war against the guerrillas. Initially fighting for the rights of the poor classes. So the bananas occupy a chapter in that dark, violent history of my country.
TWILLEY: The banana companies—and really, there were only two that mattered by the 1920s: United Fruit, and its competitor Standard Fruit, which is called Dole today—they truly ran the countries they operated in. They controlled the government, they had access to the US military—they got what they wanted, which was cheap bananas.
GRABER: It’s impossible to exaggerate the influence and control that banana companies had. They ran the railroads, as we said. They also built hospitals and the electricity grid, they ran radio networks. And they generated basically all of the income that the Latin American countries needed to pay their debts.
DIAZGRANADOS: So, over the years these plantations became huge. They had the support of the government. They, the United Fruit was also supporting the politicians, in various ways. And, because the decisions were made in, like a totally influenced way, that’s why many times we call these countries banana republics.
TWILLEY: Yes, banana republic is not just a clothing store. It is in fact a term coined by the writer O. Henry to refer to countries where the government was totally ineffective because the banana companies were in charge—primarily Honduras, which had become banana central by then, but later Guatemala, which picked up the banana baton.
GRABER: And like Mauricio said, the biggest company of all was United Fruit. By the 1920s, it was so big, and so influential, and had tentacles that were so far reaching, that Latin American journalists had started nicknaming United Fruit “El Pulpo,” the octopus. And unsurprisingly, El Pulpo’s motives and desires over the next decades—those were not usually good for the locals.
TWILLEY: And in the end, not so great for the bananas either. Because all those Gros Michel bananas, they were all clones, all growing together on plantations. Which meant that when disaster struck, they were all at risk.
DIAZGRANADOS: And that’s what is sometimes called bananapocalyptic scenario.
[MUSIC]
TWILLEY: That’s right, you are just going to have to sit tight and wait for bananageddon till next episode.
GRABER: That, plus all the unusual and delicious banana varieties that we’re missing out on in the US.
TWILLEY: Thank you this episode to Mauricio Diazgranados, Anthony Rodriguez, Dan Koeppel, Ben Brisbois, and Amy Spellacy.
GRABER: Check out our website for a link to Dan’s fabulous book and the New York Botanical Garden, and everyone’s photos and research, et cetera. Thanks as always to our fantastic producer Claudia Geib. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, till then!