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	<title>Dan Koeppel&#039;s Blog &#187; Banana History</title>
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	<description>Bananas, Los Angeles, and Transit Geekery</description>
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		<title>Just for Kids: How Bananas Came to America</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/1430#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/1430#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 08 Jan 2011 01:53:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Chiquita]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[banana kids]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[This is a special post, excerpted and modified from my book, designed for kids, visiting from The Mini Page, a syndicated feature published in over 500 newspapers every week. Lorenzo Dow Baker: Banana Pioneer Bananas were available in the United States immediately following the Civil War. But they were a luxury item, like caviar, consumed more for status than taste. (Plantains, for cooking, had been a staple in the southern parts of the hemisphere since Spanish times.)  Most Americans had never seen, sampled, or even heard of the fruit. What few bananas North Americans ate were sold at a dime apiece—about two dollars today—and came peeled, sliced, and wrapped in foil. They were usually mushy and brown by the time they got to the table. The closest place to the U.S. bananas could be grown, at the time, was Jamaica. The trip from that Caribbean island to the ports of the American northeast could take as long as three weeks aboard the sail-driven schooners of the day. That wasn’t fast enough to keep bananas fresh. But if the winds were just right, a ship could sail faster. Then, a cargo hold full of bananas could fetch a fine price. In 1870, [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Banana Industry Founder&#039;s Home: Yours for $3.6 Million</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/38#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/38#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:56:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Chiquita]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Photo from Prudential Cape Shores Real Estate. Link Below. Lorenzo Dow Baker &#8211; founder of the American banana industry. Now you can live in his house. Photo: Library of Congress. This home &#8211; which sits on ten acres within the Cape Cod National Seashore, in Massachusetts, was the birthplace of Lorenzo Dow Baker, the sea captain whose first load of bananas to the United States &#8211; sold in 1870 &#8211; launched the Boston Fruit Company, later United Fruit, now known as Chiquita. After he became a banana mogul, Baker&#8217;s primary residence was at a mansion in the banana-rush town of Port Antonio, Jamaica &#8211; where he was said to light his cigars with five dollar bills &#8211; but that dwelling has long since burned to the ground. This seaside parcel was put on the market by its current owners, the Biddle family &#8211; a highbrow clan known for their literary salons, according a Boston Globe story &#8211; in mid-October. The property is also the former home of American writer John Dos Passos, who &#8211; ironically &#8211; was a critic of the company Baker founded. Here&#8217;s (first entry on the page) the real estate listing, with more pictures, if you&#8217;re thinking [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Not Everyone Thought the Gros Michel Banana Variety was Better&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/62#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/62#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:08:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dankoeppel.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/not-everyone-thought-the-gros-michel-banana-variety-was-better/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Count Lasher: Jamaican recording star and banana lover, &#8220;lover&#8221; being the operative word. Image: MentoMusic.com Background: The banana we eat today is a variety called the &#8220;Cavendish.&#8221; But it isn&#8217;t the breed your grandparents ate. That fruit was known as the &#8220;Gros Michel,&#8221; and it was &#8211; by all reports &#8211; a bigger, hardier, and better tasting fruit than the one we now consume. But the Gros Michel was susceptible to a disease that wiped it out as a commercial crop by the 1960s. The Cavendish was only adopted because it resisted that disease. Today, a new form of the disease is back, and this time, the Cavendish is the banana getting sick. There&#8217;s no cure in sight. But did everyone prefer the taste of the Gros Michel? Apparently not&#8230; There are tons of banana songs &#8211; the Chiquita jingle and Day-O (actually called &#8220;The Banana Boat Song&#8221;) are among the best known &#8211; but my current favorite has to be &#8220;Robusta Banana,&#8221; a song recorded in the 1950s by a Jamaican singer named Count Lasher. Here&#8217;s just one verse of the song, which mentions several banana breeds: &#8220;Gros Michelle&#8221; she said, &#8220;is not too bad&#8221; &#8211; People like it [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Have Banana Prices Gone Insane?</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/95#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/95#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:15:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Politics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dankoeppel.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/have-banana-prices-gone-insane/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Flooding in Ecuador &#8211; the world&#8217;s largest exporter of bananas &#8211; have raised prices of what is traditionally the cheapest fruit in the supermarket. Since January, 2008 &#8211; if you buy bananas, you&#8217;ve certainly noticed this &#8211; prices have gone way up: in Los Angeles, from about 59 cents to as much as 79 cents a pound. So far, the largest Ecuadorean banana company &#8211; Bonita &#8211; has made no statement on the crisis, and banana sales have remained strong &#8211; but flat &#8211; because the fruit remains the lowest-priced on store shelves. But the situation is an illustration of how fragile the banana market is; if disease should strike Latin America, prices will go up far more than the floods have prompted them to, and for the first time in over a century, apples (which now cost between about a dollar and three dollars a pound) could once again be a better value than the world&#8217;s favorite fruit. Despite the troubles, former Ecuadorean presidential candidate Alvaro Noboa remains the richest man in his country, and child labor laws there remain weak. Pressure to keep banana prices down in the face of the flooding crisis will likely affect neither.]]></description>
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		<title>This ninny says bananas disprove evolution&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/96#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/96#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:47:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Weird]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dankoeppel.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/this-ninny-says-bananas-disprove-evolution/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This fellow, Ray Comfort, is using a banana to prove that a &#8220;designer&#8221; created the universe. The general idea is that only an intelligent force could have created such a naturally convenient item (with a protective wrapper, an easy-to-use &#8220;pull tab,&#8221; perfect shape, etc.) There is so much stupid about this that it would be laughable, if so many people didn&#8217;t fall for it. The reality, simply put, is that the banana is so &#8220;perfect&#8221; for human consumption because we&#8217;ve spent seven millennia &#8211; longer than just about any other crop &#8211; cultivating it to be so. In other words, since we&#8217;ve selected and reselected the best bananas, finally arriving at the one we eat today, the fruit &#8211; rather than proving that an unseen hand created it &#8211; tells us the opposite: we&#8217;re the ones who made it what it is, and we used the tools of evolution to do so. Oh, and also, the other guy in the video is washed-up child star Kirk Cameron, of &#8220;Growing Pains.&#8221; Crediblity achieved. Watch the video&#8230;if you want to read more about Comfort, or the Athiest Test, click below (you&#8217;ll also find out why peanut butter contains yet another proof of [...]]]></description>
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		<item>
		<title>What does Keira Knightley have to do with our endangered banana?</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/98#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/98#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:44:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dankoeppel.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/what-does-keira-knightley-have-to-do-with-our-endangered-banana/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[She&#8217;s shooting a movie called &#8220;The Duchess,&#8221; where she plays Lady Cavendish, the 18th Century Duchess of Devonshire. Here&#8217;s the description of the movie from AceShowbiz: &#8220;Duchess chronicles the life of 18th century aristocrat Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, an ancestor of Princess Diana who was alternately celebrated and reviled for her extravagant political and personal lives. Accompanying Knightley in the cast are Ralph Fiennes as William Cavendish, the fifth Duke of Devonshire, and Dominic Cooper as Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey.&#8221; In my book, I explain that our banana &#8211; the endangered one &#8211; is called the Cavendish. It is named after the Duchess&#8217;s son, the third William Cavendish, and the sixth duke. This Cavendish &#8211; who never married, and was known as &#8220;the bachelor duke&#8221; &#8211; spent his time building up the family estate&#8217;s gardens and greenhouses. Around 1830, he received a sample banana plant that had been brought to England from the South Pacific. The Cavendish banana&#8217;s stock eventually was brought to the Caribbean, where it became the &#8220;mother plant&#8221; for most of the fruit we eat today. I don&#8217;t know if the sixth duke&#8217;s mom looked much like Keira Knightley, but, as the accompanying illustrations show, [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Visitors to ex-banana castle are welcomed by goddess Venus with open no arms.</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/107#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/107#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:19:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dankoeppel.wordpress.com/2008/02/15/visitors-to-ex-banana-castle-are-welcomed-by-goddess-venus-with-open-no-arms/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Converting former factories to art spaces isn&#8217;t new &#8211; but turning an old banana processing facility into one is. This ex-industrial building, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was once the home of D. Theodoredis &#38; Sons Inc., a Chiquita subsidiary that distributed fruit to markets in the northeastern U.S. The old plant included ripening rooms &#8211; where temperature and atomosphere are controlled to keep fruit green as long as possible &#8211; and was a receiving point for fruit brought by trains from ports along the eastern seaboard. The 63,000 square foot plant was repurposed in 1998 as the &#8220;Banana Factory,&#8221; a community art center that includes galleries, classrooms, studios, and a theater (the &#8220;factory&#8221; part of the name is a misnomer, but it somehow feels appropriate; I wonder if locals called it that historically.) I&#8217;m working on finding out how long the Theodoredis operation ran, when it was sold to Chiquita, and when it was shuttered. I&#8217;d like to hear from you if you know anything about the old banana operation, if you&#8217;ve visited the art center, and especially if you can make any before-and-after comparisons. Leave a comment or email me at the link on my &#8220;About&#8221; page. Here&#8217;s a link [...]]]></description>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Last Bananero</title>
		<link>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/158#utm_source=feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=feed</link>
		<comments>http://www.bigparadela.com/wordpress/archives/158#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Bananas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Chiquita]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Banana History]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dankoeppel.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/the-last-bananero/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bananeros &#8211; or &#8220;Banana Men&#8221; &#8211; were the gringos who tamed the Central American jungle and established the banana industry that we know today. They were railroad builders and cowboys, botanists and explorers. In my book, I explain the more-than-problematic history of the bananero culture, and how it led to a century of misery and bloodshed. Here&#8217;s a first-hand account by one of the few surviving bananeros I met during a visit to Honduras&#8230; THE NIGHT AFTER I VISITED FHIA, THE EXPERIMENTAL BANANA FARM IN HONDURAS, Juan Fernando Aguilar and his wife picked me up in their battered pickup truck; we drove past a few roadside markets – huge bunches of plantain hung, old style, in open-front, tin and plywood shacks – to meet one of the last “United Fruit” men living in Honduras; &#8220;George&#8221; (I&#8217;ve changed his name) was burly and cheerful, and I instantly recognized a New York accent, surprising him, because he hadn’t been to the city in 50 years. We sat on the patio of tiny restaurant outside of San Pedro Sula, the city closest to Chiquita’s old La Lima compound. We ate fried fish and salad with shredded cabbage and tomatoes, washed down with [...]]]></description>
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