Under the Manhattan Bridge, a special banana. © 2010, Dan Koeppel
The corporate banana monoculture, based on the Cavendish variety – which accounts for 99% of the world’s export crop – is both doomed and dangerous. Diseases are striking the world crop, forcing increased used of pesticides (when the diseases are curable, which isn’t always the case.) Reliance on a single, commodity fruit makes it impossible to do anything but exploit workers and land – it would be too expensive to do otherwise. The banana industry, however, refuses to budge from the monoculture, for the most part, saying it is impossible to import any other variety in bulk.
But that’s exactly what is being done in so-called ethnic markets. Here’s a shot I took last month of an alternate variety, commonly known as “apple” bananas, being sold under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown.
What does this mean? The fruit comes from Del Monte, one of the world’s largest banana importers (though it isn’t a major presence in the U.S.) I’d ask the question: does “impossible” mean that systems really can’t be developed, or that the major banana outfits – Dole and Chiquita – are simply afraid (or lack the creativity) to run their banana business as anything but the boring, exploitative, and doomed entity of the past century?
By the way, those under-the-bridge fruit are amazingly good. Try one – let it ripen to a rather brown, speckled state, a little more than you might for a conventional banana – and you’ll be rewarded with complex flavor, creamy texture, and pure fruit satisfaction.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
