Bananas

The world’s most dangerous fruit.

Banana Gin kills 81 in Uganda

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This is tragic. Uganda – the world’s top banana consuming nation (with an average intake of about 500 pounds per person, compared to about 25 pounds for the typical U.S. consumers) – finds dozens of ways to use the fruit. That includes the national dish, a sort of mush called matooke, along with banana beer and a banana spirit – that’s the gin in question – called waragi. Last week, 80 people died after consuming a home-distilled batch of the drink that was, apparently, laced with methanol. Many suffered blindness and kidney failure before they actually succumbed.

Tragic, as I said, so I hope you won’t see this video – which I made in the Democratic Republic of Congo after my first taste of waragi – makes light of the situation. Even bottled and (assumedly) pure, the stuff isn’t so great, though my review was a little more kind…

Banana Museum, Saved, Again!

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Still the best banana picture ever.

I met Ken “Bananaster” Banister about six years ago, when I was beginning to research my book. At that point, his museum occupied a storefront in Altadena, California (a suburb of Los Angeles.) He’d been running the museum for decades, and it was the most amazing repository of banana items I’d ever seen. But Ken was retiring, and was trying to sell the place. At that point, he was asking several hundred thousand dollars for the facility; an eBay auction resulted in no takers.
A couple of years later, with the future of the museum in jeopardy, he moved it to an exhibition center provided by the city of Hesperia – a high-desert town between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All seemed well when I visited in 2008. But earlier this year, Hesperia told Ken that his collection – now reduced – could no longer be accommodated. The search for a new home was on, again. Last week, that home was found: Virginia Garbutt, who owns a liquor store near Salton Sea – a dry lake bed and former resort area south of Palm Springs – picked up the collection, and hopes it will be a tourist attraction.

I hope so too, and I’m optimistic. I also hope that the new owners will maintain Ken’s sunny and wacky demeanor. Sunny, as in “a banana looks like a smile”  (he told me that when I first met him) and wacky, as in the picture below.

CNN did a comprehensive report on the saga; the picture illustrating the story is from my collection.

Here’s an account of my visit to the Hesperia museum.

Here’s a chapter from my book that didn’t make the final cut about Ken and his museum.

Chinese-language edition is out.

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Tell your friends. Buy it here. Korea edition coming soon.

Banana Price Watch: Australia edition

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted; lots of travel. I’m in Sydney, Australia right now, and I’m surprised at the wide variety of banana prices here. Australia is a major banana-growing nation, so it doesn’t need to import (though banana disease might change that.) In a one-hour walk through town, I saw some pretty divergent costs. What’s key – see the analysis at the end of this entry – is that Aussie prices probably, for better and worse, reflect our banana future.

Not the Trader Joe's price.

First up, the above fruit, at five for 5.00. That’s not per kilo, that’s per fruit. With the Aussie dollar trading about even with U.S. currency, that’s the A NEW RECORD for fruit sold at a standard market – over $10USD per pound, and that’s a “special.” (Maybe my math is wrong. Let me know; I’m comparing at six ounces per fruit.) Compare that to Trader Joe’s, in the U.S., which sells bananas – imported from Latin America – five for a single buck.

A little better?

These go for $3.49 per kilo, or $1.58 per pound. Using the standard index of six ounces per fruit, that’s a pricey 59 cents per. Ouch.

More like it, but still…

This bunch, at the equivalent of 90 cents per pound U.S., was at Aldi, which bills itself as “Australia’s Cheapest Supermarket.” But even that’s a high price; no major U.S. supermarket chain that I know of charges more than 79 cents.

ANALYSIS: So, why the premium? One would think that since these are local fruit, prices would be much lower. Not so, for two reasons.  Australia is a first-world country, which means that banana workers there are paid a living wage. That’s different than the U.S. system of banana economics, which still relies on exploitative labor arrangements in Latin America, source of all our fruit. Second, Australia isn’t looking at the Panama Disease scourge that threatens to wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop; it is fighting the disease now, with less-than-encouraging results (at least in the field. In the lab, things may be better. See my Australia page for related posts.) Supply and demand affects banana prices everywhere, as I wrote last year in the New York Times. Our future probably involves higher prices, because of banana disease, but it also isn’t crazy to wonder why third-world workers shouldn’t be paid a wage that would give them the same kind of economic status as Aussie banana laborers. But they’re not, and they suffer because of it – and because we insist on banana with record-shattering low prices, like these I recently saw on a Los Angeles street corner.

Alternate Banana Varieties in NYC

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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.

Banana Gift Guide 2009

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I’m ashamed.

Boing Boing is my favorite website. The editors there are constantly scooping me on banana gadgets, and this reflects poorly on me. So, this year’s banana holiday gift guide is (apologetically) shoplifted  from a bunch of posts BB ran earlier this month, and which it rightfully applied the “awesome” tag to.

A banana peeler; from Craphound, via Boing Boing.
A banana peeler. Official name: The “Banana Splitter,” from Book of Joe.

From Boing Boing.
A banana saver. From Organize.com.)

Bananas in, ripening delayed.

A banana ripening bag, from Lakeland kitchen supplies, U.K.

A banana “sheath.” Grotesque, from the Museum of Modern Art store, NYC.

Routes, walks, bananas, more!

Using the blog…

THE BANANA BLOG is about the world's most endangered - and dangerous - fruit. THE BIG PARADE is about stairways, route and transit geekery, and pedestrian pursuits in Los Angeles. You can also read all the topics at once, which might also include productivity, geekery, DIY whatever, mountain biking, stuff that I think is funny that nobody else likely will, and other boring, useless crap.

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