Pod Insights Gastropod Bananageddon! Say Goodbye to *the* Banana, and Hello to the Weird and Wonderful World of Bananas, Plural About this episode Yes, it's true: the banana we know and love is going the way of the dodo bird. An incurable strain of the fungal Panama disease known as TR4 is currently wiping out tens of thousands of acres of banana plantations, from Malaysia to Australia and Mozambique to El Salvador. But what's bananas is that this has all happened before! Is history doomed to repeat itself? Find out in the grand finale of our banana series. It's banana-pocalypse then *and* now, in this story of CIA subterfuge and human parakeets—plus we get to the bottom of the mystery of banana-flavored candy and meet the weird and wonderful candidates auditioning for the role of banana of the future.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 A killer fungus is destroying millions of bananas and threatening the world's supply of the tasty fruit. The soil-borne fungus called the Panama disease has already affected crop supplies in Asia, Africa, and Australia.
0:15 Cynthia Graber? Banana apocalypse, banana get in. In our last episode, Mauricio Diaz-Granados told us that there was a disease threatening to wipe out our beloved bananas, and it's true.
0:24 Nicola Twilley? On that cherry note, welcome to part two of the Gastropod Banana Fest. Yes, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Nicola Twilley.
0:35 Cynthia Graber? And I'm Cynthia Graber. Last episode, we told you the story of how the banana became the most popular fruit in America and how it transformed the countries where it was grown. This episode, we look at where the threat of the banana apocalypse came from and what scientists and breeders are doing to save the banana.
0:52 Nicola Twilley? We've got parakeets, naked presidents, and a whole bunch of exciting new bananas that we're auditioning for the role of banana of the future.
1:01 Cynthia 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.
1:14 Speaker 03 Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. According to Forbes, one in three pets will need emergency treatment this year. And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Vet bills don't have to hit that hard. Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits, and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on TrustPilot. Get a free quote in minutes at fetchpet.com/save. That's fetchpet.com/save.
1:56 Speaker 04 Hey, this is banana candy. But it doesn't taste like bananas. Why?
2:03 Speaker 05 Bananas and banana flavoring. Why do they taste so wildly different? Anything that's banana flavored doesn't taste anything like the bananas that we get at the grocery store.
2:12 Nicola Twilley? I actually love the taste of those foam banana gummies, but they are most definitely quite distinct from the taste of an actual banana from the store.
2:21 Cynthia Graber? I like them, too. I love banana flavored pretty much everything. I'd always chalked up the difference to the fact that it's candy, like strawberry candy tastes pretty different from real strawberries. But it turns out there might be something else going on here.
2:32 Nicola Twilley? One theory favored by internet detectives is that the flavor discrepancy can be traced back to the fact that the banana that was around when banana flavoring was first created is not the same as the banana we eat today.
2:46 Cynthia Graber? To see if that's true, we have to take a step back in history to the original banana plantations, the ones we told the story of last episode. Remember, basically, none of these bananas have seeds, and they're all the exact same banana. It's called the growy shell. This is Mauricio Dias-Grenadas again. He's the chief scientific officer of the New York Botanical Garden.
3:04 Speaker 05 The problem is that because they're being propagated vegetatively, so they are clones of each other, they are genetically identical.
3:15 Nicola Twilley? Every single one of the millions and millions of bananas that were being grown on United Fruit and Standard Fruit plantations in the Caribbean and Latin America was a big, yellow-fruited banana called the growy shell. Having the same banana growing was super convenient for the companies, and it was comforting and familiar to consumers.
3:34 Cynthia Graber? But that left the banana plantations incredibly vulnerable to disease.
3:38 Speaker 06 Because they're sort of a genetically similar buffet for a pathogen to really eat its way through.
3:46 Nicola Twilley? This is Ben Briesbois. He's a professor of public health at the University of Montreal. And because we're just getting the gang back together, here's Dan Kapel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. Scientists were warning the banana companies, don't
4:02 Cynthia Graber? Do this, diversify, find other bananas, change your supply chains. Of course, the banana companies didn't listen to that advice. Growing just one banana clone was the way for everything to be as cheap as possible. And so they also ignored the warning signs of a disease noticed in the Pacific in 1914 called sigatoca.
4:18 Speaker 06 So sigatoca, it detoxes the leaf surface and then that reduces the yield from the fruit itself?
4:24 Nicola Twilley? Sigatoca is a fungus that's airborne. And when it lands on a banana leaf, those leaves develop yellow streaks and then black spots. And then, because there are so few healthy leaves left, the plant doesn't have enough energy to make a lot of bananas. And the bananas it does produce turn soft right away when they're harvested, so you can't really sell them.
4:44 Cynthia Graber? Sigatoca spread from the Pacific around the world, and it eventually made it to Central America. By the 1930s, it was definitely in Honduras at least. And a huge storm in Honduras in 1935 blew sigatoca all around the plantations.
4:56 Nicola Twilley? United Fruit spent a lot of money looking into ways to stop the spread of sigatoca. One solution seemed to be to plant bananas under shade trees. That way, the fungus landed on the leaves of those trees and mostly left the bananas alone. But those shade trees tended to become home to little mammals and insects that might blemish the banana skins. And US consumers require perfect bananas.
5:22 Cynthia Graber? Instead, United Fruit scientists focused on a chemical that had been developed in the late 1800s in the Bordeaux wine region of France to control a fungus on grapes. It was called Bordeaux mixture.
5:32 Speaker 06 So Bordeaux mixture was copper sulfate mixed with quicklime in water. And so it actually would control the fungus to an extent.
5:42 Cynthia Graber? Copper is known to stop germs from growing and spreading. And in this case, it did, in fact, stop the fungus spores from reproducing.
5:49 Speaker 06 And so this Bordeaux mixture was sprayed from a central area and sprayed throughout a plantation using very large tubes and very large pumps.
5:59 Nicola Twilley? Bordeaux mixture had to be applied at an epic scale. 250 gallons per acre 20 to 30 times each year. The banana companies installed miles and miles of pipes and thousands. Thousands of pumps, and they used so much of the world's supply of copper sulfate that they had to send out mining engineers to find new sources.
6:20 Cynthia Graber? All this spraying didn't just kill the fungus. A local governor at the time in Honduras reported that it pretty much killed everything it was applied to, all kinds of insects, animals such as squirrels, everything.
6:30 Nicola Twilley? But sigatoca was more or less halted. And actually, there was a silver lining for United Fruit and Standard Fruit, the really big banana companies. Because they were the only ones who could afford this massive investment in pesticide infrastructure, any remaining competition was driven out of business. Smaller scale growers just gave up.
6:50 Cynthia Graber? But small scale growers lost something else, and that's food. Sigatoca spread to the bananas that local people were eating. Sweet bananas, starchy plantains, these were being killed off too. And hunger wasn't the only problem people who lived on or near the plantations were facing.
7:04 Speaker 06 Bordeaux mixture causes a condition called vineyard sprayer's lung, where lungs, they're essentially rotted from the inside. And workers would be turned blue, especially the spray workers, would be turned blue by the copper sulfate.
7:17 Nicola Twilley? This blue thing sounds exaggerated, but it's true. Banana workers in charge of spraying used to wake up with their bed sheets turned blue from their sweat overnight. The stuff was in them.
7:28 Speaker 05 And they are known as los pericos, parakeets, because of the color their skin takes on. And banana workers who become too sick to work are left to die.
7:39 Cynthia Graber? And a lot of them did die. You'd think that something this toxic would eventually be banned. And while it is illegal in some countries, in other places, it's actually still in use today, though in much smaller amounts and in theory, in a much more controlled and safer manner.
7:52 Nicola Twilley? But sigatoca was not the only fungus to find the idea of infecting a plantation's worth of clones quite attractive. There was another fungus of concern in the region, Panama disease. This wasn't airborne, so it was a little slower moving. It traveled by contact.
8:09 Speaker 05 So if I'm a banana worker and I have a machete, And I cut down one tree that has, you know, a little bit of this disease. And then I use the machete on the next tree, that tree's going to get sick.
8:18 Cynthia Graber? And it was just as deadly to bananas as sigatoca. Plants that are infected with Panama disease end up with purplish brown stalks that really kind of stink, their leaves wilt, and then the plants barely produce any fruit at all. It's bad.
8:31 Nicola Twilley? The banana companies first discovered Panama disease on their plantations in Panama, hence the name. They tried to do a lot of things to get rid of it. They tried flooding their plantations to wash it out. They pumped huge amounts of water into the fields, but all that did was spread the fungus further.
8:49 Cynthia Graber? They also set up research facilities to study Panama disease and try to find a chemical that would kill it, but they couldn't. And we still don't have one. There's no fungicide today that can get rid of Panama disease.
9:00 Nicola Twilley? And the obvious solution, grow a different banana that was resistant to Panama disease, that didn't work either. Not because there weren't bananas that were resistant, there were. But when Standard Fruit started shipping one of them in the 1940s, Americans just didn't buy it. The bunches of this new banana variety were small and the fruits themselves were quite short, and it was no growy shell.
9:25 Cynthia Graber? While all of this was going on, the disease was spreading quickly. It was wiping out thousands of acres of banana plantations. At the same time, demand kept on growing in America.
9:35 Speaker 05 Banana companies aren't saying, oh, you know, we just lost 30% of Panama or all of Suriname, as happened. So let's calibrate our marketing efforts so we can sell fewer bananas. No, they say, oh, my God, we got to grow more bananas. We need more land. We got to tear down more rainforests. We got to make these even cheaper. And so every time a plantation falls to Panama disease, another one is cut.
9:57 Speaker 06 And so having land available that was uninfected, that was probably uncleared, became a vital business strategy. When divisions would be infected with Panama disease, United Fruit would open up new ones.
10:11 Nicola Twilley? And that meant leaving behind vast ghost plantations that the companies also held on to, just in case. All of which meant that United Fruit and Standard Fruit ended up owning Truly astonishing amounts of land in Latin America, much of which was totally empty at any given moment.
10:28 Cynthia Graber? Guatemala is a great example of this. In Guatemala, more than 70% of all the arable land available in the entire country was owned by banana companies, but 3/4 of it wasn't being used. It didn't have any bananas on it.
10:41 Nicola Twilley? In the 1930s and 40s, the leader of Guatemala was a super wealthy general who was also super repressive. He had a great relationship with the banana companies and the US, so he was fine with United Fruit stockpiling vast amounts of land to help them cope with Panama disease.
10:58 Cynthia Graber? But then he got toppled in the 1940s, and there was finally a less tyrannical leader. He was much more sympathetic to the needs of the poor people in his country, not just the elite. He finished his term in 1950, and then this newly democratic country made way for its next elected president, Jacobo Arbenz.
11:15 Speaker 06 When Arbenz came to power, he had the ambition to redistribute land to Guatemala's poor majority.
11:20 Nicola Twilley? Arbenz asked United Fruit to give him the land that cannot be used for bananas. It seems an entirely reasonable request. Super reasonable, especially because Arbenz planned to compensate United Fruit. He was going to give them exactly the amount they declared it was worth on their tax returns.
11:39 Speaker 06 And United Fruit actually declared a very small amount of money as the value of the land on their taxes. And so Arbenz compensated them at that value, at which point they said, I don't know, actually, the land's worth a lot more than that.
11:53 Cynthia Graber? They declared it for $600,000, but United Fruit said it was worth $16 million. They'd undervalued it. Shock.
12:01 Nicola Twilley? Arbenz went ahead anyway. I mean, it wasn't his fault United Fruit was lying on their tax returns. And so, Arbenz nationalizes about 200,000 acres of United Fruit land. Productive land is not taken, but United Fruit appeals to the US government.
12:17 Cynthia Graber? For help. Now, I'm not saying there was a connection, but one of the members of United Fruit's board, Alan Dulles, is the brother of the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Cozy. Whether or not that relationship made the difference, the US government did want to help United Fruit, but they felt like they couldn't take military action on behalf of the company without some kind of excuse, however flimsy. So they started out with a propaganda attack.
12:43 Speaker 06 The United States mounted a sophisticated publicity campaign, portraying our bends as sort of the red menace of international communism.
12:51 Cynthia Graber? As part of this campaign, United Fruit took journalists on trips to show them how big a threat Guatemala posed to American security. They hired a journalist to write a quote unquote, "fact finding report" investigating ties between our bends and the Soviet Union that they then sent out to congressmen and senators. They even made a movie that basically made it seem as if bananas and the free world were one and the same thing. It was called Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas.
13:21 Speaker 05 Large amounts of private capital from the United States are being invested to build new industrial and agricultural enterprises, which help to strengthen the economy of Central America. And therefore, the agents of international communism have selected the United Fruit Company as a prime target of attack. No wonder then, red leaders detest and fear the company that grows ships and markets bananas so successfully.
13:50 Cynthia Graber? This was all propaganda. There's no truth to the allegations that our bends was in bed with the Kremlin in an attempt to unfairly attack United Fruit. But after the successful propaganda campaign, it finally was time for military action to supposedly protect United Fruit from the communists in Guatemala. This was in the mid 50s. First, there was a naval blockade, and then the American military showed up.
14:12 Speaker 06 And as a result of a lot of sophisticated intelligence and communications work, a lot of the Guatemalan troops were convinced the US was invading with a giant force.
14:24 Cynthia Graber? There actually weren't a lot of Americans compared to the Guatemalan army, but the Guatemalans had been led to believe that they didn't have a chance, so they pretty much gave up. This war ends very quickly. Our bends falls. He's let out naked onto the tarmac. He has flown away and he begins this sort of five-year sojourn, trying to get back, and eventually dies in a bathtub in Mexico around 1960.
14:46 Speaker 05 What happens in Guatemala? The democracy is overthrown. And so begins the most oppressive right wing government in the history of Central America up until that time. That government extrapolates in this brutal, horrific, genocidal way. The idea that if banana workers need rights, we must strip all rights from banana workers and possibly kill them. And so the Mayan genocide begins. The Mayan genocide continues until the 1980s. At least 200,000 Guatemalan indigenous people, indigenous Mayans, are murdered. And the country doesn't return to democracy until about 1990 something.
15:28 Speaker 05 So literally, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it, this is the fault of the banana companies and the banana business model.
15:35 Nicola Twilley? Like we saw last episode in Colombia, the ripple effect of Big Banana in Central America went far, far beyond what anyone could have imagined, ruining lives for generations.
15:46 Cynthia Graber? But not all lives. There were some locals who benefited too. They were the ones who helped the Americans win.
15:51 Speaker 05 This didn't just make Americans rich, it made the Central American elite rich. And we got to remember the ethnic makeup of much of Central America. It's white people descended from the Spanish, the ruling class, and indigenous people. And so the indigenous people were the ones who suffered and the elite classes got money. And so they were accomplices. The brutality, the acquisitiveness was invented by North Americans, but it was embraced by the Central American elite.
16:23 Nicola Twilley? The rich became richer, the poor became poorer, the environment was trashed, and the banana remained an American supermarket staple.
16:31 Cynthia Graber? But this moment actually marked a turning point for the banana companies. This overthrow of the government in Guatemala, it wasn't the only coup the US government was involved in. The CIA also helped out with the non-banana related coup in Iran, also in the 50s, and the American public noticed and started to think that maybe overthrowing foreign governments wasn't a great idea.
16:50 Speaker 05 This becomes less acceptable and possibly less successful. And so the banana
16:57 Speaker 05 Companies begin to change their strategy and what they do is they divest. They begin to sell these plantations to trusted local entrepreneurs, local businesses. This gives them plausible deniability for anything that happens.
17:12 Nicola Twilley? Hmm, it sounds like maybe the banana companies didn't learn their lesson and instead just change tactics. Can this be true? Let's find out after the break.
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18:11 Cynthia Graber? So after a successful coup in Guatemala, but a backlash from the American public, as we said, the banana companies changed business tactics. But then they also had to do something else. They had to change their bananas. Panama disease was ripping through the countries that grew bananas and killing off miles and miles of plants.
18:28 Nicola Twilley? Despite decades of research at this point, there was still no pesticide that worked and their whole technique of just acquiring more land was increasingly challenging for both political and geographical reasons. The obvious solution was to just switch to a disease resistant banana, but they really, really didn't want to.
18:48 Speaker 06 United Fruit had worked very hard to identify Gru Michel as the banana. They had a whole system of growing, transporting and marketing a very specific banana that they were convinced was the only one consumers would really appreciate.
19:01 Cynthia Graber? As we mentioned, by this point, there were two companies that dominated the market, United Fruit and their competitor, Standard Fruit. Standard was a little ahead of United when it came to switching fruit.
19:10 Speaker 05 Now, Standard Fruit, which is not yet known as Dole, but will be, is a much smaller company with a 10 to 20% market share. They can't afford any kind of disruption. They're going to go out of business for sure. And so They begin to experiment with Cavendish.
19:25 Nicola Twilley? There were options out there, tasty, seedless bananas that weren't affected by the fungus that causes Panama disease at all. Dan mentioned one of them, the Cavendish, but researchers had come up with a handful. So Standard began trialing them, growing them in small amounts and selling them to US consumers. But like we said, the fruit of one good candidate was judged to be too short, and yet another variety needed many more nutrients, which would be expensive in terms of fertilizers. And so they were striking out.
19:56 Cynthia Graber? Then there was this variety that had made its way to a British grower on the island of Mauritius, and he just called it the China banana. Eventually, this banana was sent to England.
20:04 Speaker 05 It's grown specifically in a greenhouse in England at an estate called Devonshire.
20:09 Nicola Twilley? The family name of the Dukes of Devonshire is Cavendish, and the banana was growing at Chatsworth House, their fabulous estate in the Derbyshire Dales.
20:18 Speaker 05 They have this banana in this glass house, and it's brought over to Jamaica to the Institute of Tropical Agriculture. And it's one of the many bananas that the banana companies are always experimenting with at their test farms, even as early as the 1920s. They're growing dozens, but none of them have the characteristics needed because Gros Michel is so ideal, partially for its taste, but mostly because of its shipability.
20:40 Nicola Twilley? So remember how we started out with the whole mystery of why banana flavoring doesn't really taste like bananas? This is maybe a part of the answer. If banana flavoring was developed back when the Gros Michel was the reference banana, well, then that makes sense because the Gros Michel tastes a little different from its replacement.
21:01 Speaker 05 The Gros Michel is known as a better tasting banana than the banana we eat, which is called the Cavendish, and it is better. Is it a lot better in terms of taste? Maybe not. It's sort of like Different grades of vanilla ice cream. And there's sort of the stuff in the big half gallon tub. And then there's the pints and then there's the really fancy. So the Gromy Shell is kind of the Haagen Dazs compared to the Breyer's. That's the Cavendish.
21:26 Cynthia Graber? I know that Dan is the true banana expert here, but I have to say, I'm not sure I agree with him about the Gromy Shell being the Haagen Dazs of the banana world.
21:33 Nicola Twilley? I mean, I struggle to taste the difference between Haagen Dazs and Breyer's.
21:37 Cynthia Graber? I'm actually a big fan of Breyer's vanilla. But anyway, when it comes to the Gromy Shell, I've now tried it twice. I can say that it ripens a lot more slowly. So as Dan says, that'd be great for shipping. But otherwise, the difference between that and the Cavendish, I can barely tell them apart.
21:53 Nicola Twilley? Yeah, I tried a Gromy Shell a while ago, and it definitely has a thicker skin, which means more protection for shipping. But flavor wise, it's a banana.
22:02 Cynthia Graber? I'd heard this Gromy Shell banana flavor theory before. And my conclusion when I tried the Gromy Shell was that the reason banana candy tastes different from bananas, it's because it's candy.
22:13 Nicola Twilley? Friend of the show Nadia Berenstain, she's the star of our episode all about artificial flavoring. She says that artificial banana flavoring and banana flavored candy was actually for sale in the US before real bananas. So maybe we should just blame real bananas for not tasting more like the single synthetic chemical Americans were told they taste like.
22:36 Cynthia Graber? But the bigger point is that, yes, the Cavendish was resistant to Panama disease. And as Dan said, it's the banana that we all eat today. It is in fact, the one that won in the end. But Dan told us it was really the shipability issue that made it a hard fought battle.
22:50 Speaker 05 It certainly is not shippable in the way banana companies understand it then. It can't be thrown into a boat. It ripens too quickly. It's too fragile.
22:58 Cynthia Graber? If banana companies just threw bunches of Cavendish into the hold of a cargo ship, they'd be a total mess by the time they got to northern ports in America. So Standard Fruit, remember, they were going to go out of business if they couldn't find a replacement banana. So they had to move faster than United Fruit did. They came up with a brilliant solution, nestle bunches of bananas in boxes.
23:18 Speaker 05 So instead of those big hanging bunches, you see these
23:21 Nicola Twilley? Stacks and stacks of these rectangular 40-pound boxes. By the 1950s, Standard Fruit had made the switch and planted all of its plantations with Cavendish. United Fruit battled onwards with the Gros Michel, but they were hurting. In just the decade between 1950 and 1960, their profits shrank from roughly $66 million to just $2 million.
23:44 Cynthia Graber? So they really had no choice. They reluctantly switched from the Gros Michel to the Cavendish. Even though Standard had already made the switch, United Fruit was still nervous that nobody would buy the new banana. But this time, they were wrong. It certainly helped that the Cavendish pretty much looks like the Gros Michel. It's long and yellow. Banana production soared and sales kept up.
24:02 Nicola Twilley? And there's barely a blip in the banana supply. And so anyone who was born after 1965 probably has never tasted a Gros Michel, has tasted a Cavendish, and it is the banana. It turned out that one of the Cavendish's supposed flaws, its fragility, this downside also had an upside. Because each bunch had to be hand-wrapped in plastic bags and placed in a cardboard box, the companies had to set up packing plants. And if they were already doing that, well, why not take the opportunity to put a little sticker on the bananas, too?
24:36 Cynthia Graber? Before this, you had no way to know which company's bananas you were buying. But after the switch to the Cavendish, the companies could label their bananas, and they made sure you knew which one to buy.
24:47 Nicola Twilley? Hi, Chiquita Banana, and I'm here to reveal the way to spot a great banana is on the peel. Let the Blue Chiquita sticker be your guide, and you'll find a better tasting banana inside. Thanks to the Cavendish's thin skin, bananas had gone from a commodity to a brand.
25:05 Cynthia Graber? And along with the new banana came a few new growing practices, all, of course, in the name of saving money. The companies did away with as many workers as possible by putting in new technologies like cable systems for transporting bunches of bananas, and aerial spraying to get those chemicals they needed onto the ground as easily as possible.
25:21 Nicola Twilley? And in terms of chemicals, forget just plain Jane Bordeaux mixture. Post-World War II, the petroleum industry and chemical weapons producers stepped into the mix with With a real smorgasbord of new pesticides and fungicides and herbicides and other things that killed everything. The Cavendish was so fragile that any pest attack would leave a mark that made them unattractive to American consumers. So the banana companies responded by spraying early and often.
25:50 Cynthia Graber? Unsurprisingly, these chemicals didn't just attack the banana pests. Just like the Bordeaux mixture earlier in the bananas history had killed all sorts of insects and mammals in and around the plantations, these new chemicals were worse. Dead fish floated in irrigation canals, mammals like skunks and possums that came into contact with them dropped dead. It was pretty devastating.
26:09 Nicola Twilley? And for workers? Well, there wasn't even a mention of wearing protective equipment in the United Fruit Company manuals of the time, so it's safe to conclude that banana workers were frequently exposed to all these chemicals.
26:23 Cynthia Graber? Ben told us about a particular chemical that was used to kill nematodes. These are microscopic worms that can burrow into the roots of banana plants. Once a plant is infected, it doesn't produce as much fruit, but even more disastrously, it can just topple over.
26:36 Speaker 06 So, starting in the 1950s and 60s, banana companies started using a nematode named DBCP. And so DBCP was used for years in Latin America and was later found to be making workers sterile.
26:49 Nicola Twilley? What happened was that the workers at the California plant that was manufacturing this nematode-killing chemical, they discovered they were nearly all infertile. And then it emerged that the companies that had developed DBCP had kind of guessed this might be an issue based on their studies in rats.
27:07 Speaker 06 This should have been known from the initial toxicology testing of the chemical in the corporate labs where it was produced. But the corporate scientists who were at these companies, they did not communicate these results to regulators. And as a result, the chemical was approved for use. With vastly exaggerated claims of safety.
27:28 Cynthia Graber? Before the California finding, DBCP had been used with abandon in Latin America. After the California workers were found to be sterile, production in California stopped. The US government banned it, United Fruit stopped using it, though they did sell off their stockpiles locally instead of destroying them. And Standard Fruit continued to use it for another couple of years because why not?
27:48 Nicola Twilley? The consequences for Latin American banana workers are still being teased out. Researchers have argued that as many as 10,000 people in banana-growing areas suffered serious health problems from their exposure to DBCP, including cancers as well as fertility issues. The banana companies argue it never hurt anyone.
28:08 Speaker 06 There have been some settlements, especially workers have taken, mounted a number of lawsuits against banana and chemical companies over sterility. A lot of these have been thrown out of court using a variety of legal arguments. Dole, for example, maintains that it never sterilized anyone. However, they still offer compensation, they still offer programs to workers while maintaining that they don't actually have to do so.
28:36 Cynthia Graber? Now, at this point, I would love to think that the banana companies learned a lesson and stopped poisoning not only the fungi, but also the animals and, most importantly, their workers. But I am, of course, going to now be disappointed.
28:47 Nicola Twilley? Sorry, Cynthia. They just carried on spraying. Of course, they had to switch chemicals, and they kept having to anyway just because the pests would become resistant. But banana plantations were on what scientists call a pesticide treadmill. Because they got sprayed so much, all the helpful bugs and soil fungi died, so it was easier for diseases and pests to take hold, so the companies needed to spray more often.
29:13 Cynthia Graber? And the sheer amount of chemicals the companies needed to use and the frequency they needed to use them, it all just kept growing. In 1990, they would spray 30 times a year, and a decade later, they had to spray like 50 times a year. Bananas really can't survive in this type of plantation system without these chemical cocktails applied and regularly.
29:32 Nicola Twilley? But maybe did the banana companies learn? Something from the whole tragedy and at least protect their workers from these chemical exposures?
29:39 Cynthia Graber? Maybe not as much as they should. Ben visited banana plantations in Ecuador a few years ago for his research, and he said, at least on some farms, the situation was still pretty terrible.
29:49 Speaker 06 I had workers who told me, you know, we are just not provided with personal protective equipment, or we can't, we're not allowed to leave the fields.
29:57 Nicola Twilley? Which after everything is like, why? Why would companies skimp on this?
30:02 Speaker 06 It costs a bit more money to provide personal protective equipment. It costs more money to adequately train workers. It costs more money to, to remove the workers from the field when there's an overhead aerial fumigation. So people told me that these practices were still going on and reports that I've read continue to, to sort of document them.
30:20 Cynthia Graber? And public health researchers who want to try to figure out how this is affecting workers, they're having a tough time doing so. First of all, the companies aren't excited about public health research, and so they're making it hard for the researchers to get data. And as we said, the companies have to change the chemicals they use regularly, so it's hard to keep track of what's going on.
30:37 Nicola Twilley? But also, it's just such a wide variety of chemicals all being used at the same time that it's hard to figure out what the effects would be.
30:44 Speaker 06 When you test chemicals one at a time in laboratories on, for example, rats, that tells you what happens in those controlled circumstances. However, when you get a chemical sprayed on a worker, there can be a whole cocktail of chemicals that are being used.
31:01 Nicola Twilley? And no one really knows exactly what that adds up to in people's bodies. But there is increasing amounts of data showing that banana workers have elevated levels of DNA damage, which is often a precursor to cancer, as well as neurological issues and other side effects associated with pesticide exposure.
31:19 Cynthia Graber? Banana workers do know they have health problems, but they don't necessarily know why.
31:24 Speaker 03 It wasn't talked about, like, it wasn't really a problem that was talked about in the shop floor. Like, it wasn't like, oh, this chemical is doing this.
31:34 Cynthia Graber? Lila Zaglouris is an anthropologist who studies agricultural commodities, and she just published a new book called Fair Trade Enclaves: Labor and Livelihoods in Costa Rica's Banana Industry.
31:44 Speaker 03 It was more of like, I have this problem with my skin. What do I do to deal with it? It's itching. And so they will, like, you know, recommend remedies and stuff, but there wasn't a focus, and I was surprised by that, on why this was happening.
32:01 Nicola Twilley? So it's kind of like Groundhog Day in the Bananaverse. And stop me if you've heard this one before, but now disease is threatening to wipe out the banana again.
32:11 Speaker 03 The world's most popular banana may be on the verge of extinction.
32:15 Nicola Twilley? What's the threat? It's a new version of the old enemy, Panama disease.
32:20 Speaker 05 It is a different variety than the one that killed the Gros Michel, but it is just as deadly, just as virulent, just as easy to spread.
32:29 Nicola Twilley? It's called Panama disease tropical race four, or TR4 for short. And banana companies are afraid.
32:36 Speaker 03 Because if TR4 is not stopped.
32:39 Nicola Twilley? It would wipe out Cavendish.
32:40 Speaker 03 And it's already happening. Globally, we're facing the collapse of a $25 billion Cavendish industry.
32:47 Nicola Twilley? The Cavendish was and is resistant to the original Panama disease, but it's not resistant to this version. This version, TR4, had been living a quiet life in Malaysia, where there weren't a lot of Cavendish bananas to attack. But then industrial banana production started there.
33:01 Speaker 05 And so Panama disease, version two, son of Panama disease, begins to spread. And banana companies say, oh, no problem, just Malaysia.
33:10 Nicola Twilley? But TR4 wasn't satisfied with just Malaysia. It made its way around the South Pacific. It hopped over to Australia. It arrived in India. It made the jump to Africa.
33:20 Speaker 05 And sometime around, nobody knows for sure because this is kept a little secret. Sometime around 2015 to 2018, it shows up in El Salvador. And now it has spread to several more Central American countries.
33:35 Nicola Twilley? Dangerously close to where most of the world's export bananas are grown. And just like in the past, scientists haven't been able to find a pesticide that will kill it. So instead, they've been trying to breed a new resistant banana. But this is really hard.
33:50 Speaker 05 So the word that is most often used and that I use in my book to describe the banana breeding Paradox or problem is intractable. Bananas have no seeds. They are sterile. It is very difficult to breed from something sterile.
34:06 Nicola Twilley? Occasionally, they will have a single seed. But the banana breeders Dan visited with, they'd had to go through a quarter million bananas to get two dozen seeds, which makes banana breeding a very long, slow process.
34:21 Speaker 05 Now, if you're breeding conventionally, this is almost impossible because bananas only fruit once a year, and then you've got to plant a new one. So it takes years and years to develop, grow, and test.
34:33 Nicola Twilley? Obviously, this can be made a lot faster using gene editing techniques. And there is one GM banana approved for sale in Australia already. But getting genetically modified bananas to market is a whole other can of worms. That's a story we've saved for our newsletter.
34:50 Cynthia Graber? Even if and when scientists manage to breed a banana that's resistant to the new Panama disease, they won't have solved all their banana woes. The new banana has to match the Cavendish. It needs to be the same length and the same thickness, and it has to turn the same shade of yellow, and it has to do it in the same amount of time.
35:06 Speaker 05 Let's imagine that bananas get to us via a pipe from, let's say, Guatemala to New York City. That pipe, it's like a tunnel that can only handle Volkswagen Golfs. It can only fit that one kind of banana, the Cavendish. Other bananas have different qualities, different sizes. So the banana companies are not interested in inventing new pipes. They're interested in breeding bananas that will fit the existing pipe. But there are so many qualities to that pipe that it's been really difficult. These bananas taste different. They do. Some of them ripen differently, like some of them don't really turn yellow.
35:41 Nicola Twilley? And so basically, there is no new Cavendish yet. And meanwhile, the actual Cavendish is being wiped out in not so slow motion while being doused in pesticides. It is, as Mauricio told us, banana-geddon.
35:54 Cynthia Graber? So is there a better option out there? Can you buy a banana that doesn't harm the environment and banana workers? Maybe even a banana whose banana relatives will still be around after the banana apocalypse? That's coming up after the break.
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36:48 Nicola Twilley? At this point in our banana odyssey, you might be thinking, wow, things in Bananaland are pretty messed up. Maybe I shouldn't be eating them. So we asked Dan, does he still eat bananas, knowing everything he knows?
37:02 Speaker 05 I'm not going to dodge the question. I will try to stumble through what I have thought. And there are times in my life when I thought, absolutely do not eat bananas, and I haven't. And there are times in my life, including now, when I eat them.
37:15 Nicola Twilley? I also eat the occasional banana, but when I go to the grocery store, I do have some options. We talked about how stickers were the original banana brands, but today those stickers tell me I can buy fair trade bananas, which seems like it should be better. And in fact, it was a fair trade sticker on a banana that started Lila down her research path.
37:33 Cynthia Graber? I think that the first banana that really changed me was when I first moved to the UK.
37:38 Nicola Twilley? Lila grew up around bananas. She's from Costa Rica on the Caribbean side where bananas are grown. Her parents didn't work in the industry, but her childhood home was less than a mile from a banana plantation. But then she moved to London to study anthropology.
37:53 Cynthia Graber? And I saw the first fair trade banana, which I've never had seen before because you don't really find fair trade bananas in Costa Rica. So that for me was more significant because growing up in that environment, that really
38:10 Speaker 05 Me question, how can a banana be fairly traded?
38:14 Cynthia Graber? Fair trade as a movement started out many decades ago with like homemade goods that were bought directly from workers in developing countries and were meant to ensure a fair wage. They were sold to Westerners at stores like 10,000 villages. But when it comes to food products, fair trade started with coffee.
38:29 Speaker 05 The first certifications were also made in Central America and Mexico. So that that area and that crop are very important to the foundation of fair trade.
38:41 Cynthia Graber? It makes sense that fair trade started in coffee because unlike with bananas, there were still small scale farms that grew coffee. It wasn't all on huge plantations. And since fair trade was set up to promote family owned or worker owned farms, it was easy to find coffee farms that would fit the bill.
38:56 Nicola Twilley? Export bananas are mostly grown in plantations. So the business model is harder to make work with fair trade principles. Still, the first fair trade certified bananas hit the market in the 1990s. And today, something like 10 to 15% of all the bananas purchased in North America and Europe are fair trade certified. It's up to 1 in 3 in the UK. So that sounds pretty good, but does it actually improve banana workers' lives?
39:26 Cynthia Graber? That's what Lila wanted to know, so she moved back to her home region in Costa Rica to do some research. She was able to spend six months working on a conventional banana plantation and six months on a fair trade one.
39:36 Speaker 05 I just moved to the villages nearby and I worked as a banana worker. And my everyday tasks were mainly in the packing plant. Every farm has the plantation and the packing plant inside the farm. And I worked there because that's where most of the women work.
40:00 Nicola Twilley? One of the main promises of fair trade bananas is that farms will pay the workers more for their labor. The fair trade premium is supposed to improve the incomes of workers. So did workers on the fair trade banana plantation in Costa Rica make more money?
40:15 Speaker 05 The simple answer is no.
40:18 Speaker 03 But it's complicated.
40:20 Nicola Twilley? The workers didn't make more money because the farm didn't make more money. They were paid more per bunch, but they didn't sell as many bunches for two reasons. One, for whatever reason, the fair trade farm was less productive than the conventional one. But mostly, it's that they weren't selling their not-quite-perfect bananas on the secondary market locally.
40:37 Speaker 03 Nothing to do with flavor. It's just aesthetics. It's 100% aesthetics. The fair trade market only deals with first-class bananas. So the surplus in the fair trade farm is thrown away.
40:54 Nicola Twilley? This is kind of our fault as North American and European consumers. We don't buy fruit that looks at all imperfect, even if it still tastes great. And so supermarkets won't buy it either, and so growers have to find local secondary markets, which is work that not all growers have the capacity to do. So this fair trade farm just didn't sell those second-class bananas. One thing buyers might hope is that workers on a fair trade farm might overall be happier with their work than on a conventional farm because the working conditions are better.
41:25 Speaker 03 Well, yeah, it's interesting because even though most of them have been doing that work for most of their lives and their parents did the same thing, but the overall environment was not great. Like, they didn't like what they were doing. They... hate is a very strong word, but they disliked their everyday work. And having said that, especially in the fair trade farm, they were like family. It did exist, this beautiful sense of family, familiarity. And maybe it contributed to the fact that they were cooperative. You know, they have a sense of belonging.
42:06 Nicola Twilley? So that's kind of nice. But ultimately, Lila found that the workers on the fair trade banana plantation had pretty much the same labor protections, or lack of them, as the workers on the regular plantation. A lot of them were seasonal workers on short-term contracts on both farms. A lot didn't have insurance or healthcare on both farms. There wasn't a functioning union on either farm.
42:30 Speaker 03 So to answer your question... In a few words, fair trade wasn't able to change those structural factors that cause exploitation. No, the certification wasn't able to do that.
42:46 Cynthia Graber? One of the reasons the situation on both farms was fairly equal is that Costa Rica actually has pretty decent labor laws for a banana-producing country. That's not as true in Ecuador, and Ecuador produces almost 40% of all the world's bananas. Lila told us that fair trade farms in Ecuador do seem to be significantly different from conventional farms.
43:05 Nicola Twilley? United Fruit/Chiquita and Standard Fruit, or as we know it today, Dole, Ben says they started moving to Ecuador post the Guatemala coup precisely because Ecuador was even poorer, its workers weren't unionized, and it not only didn't have particularly strong labor laws, it also didn't really enforce the ones it had.
43:25 Cynthia Graber? So the government regulations of the country growing the bananas are critical. This is more important than a fair trade label.
43:31 Nicola Twilley? When it comes to the environment, which obviously also affects worker well-being, that's another area where Lila found that the biggest impact came from government regulation. But in this case, it was the government of the purchasing countries.
43:44 Speaker 03 The most strict regulations in terms of environment was the EU regulations.
43:52 Cynthia Graber? Bananas sold in the EU have to meet higher environmental standards, and so the farms growing bananas for the EU meet those standards.
43:59 Nicola Twilley? But if you're in the US, don't despair. Organic certification also severely restricts the use of synthetic pesticides and farm chemicals.
44:07 Speaker 06 And a lot of banana producers, I have heard, conventional ones will say, you know, anyone who tells you that organic production is a thing, they're lying. Now, the organic producers themselves, I've seen them, they're not lying, but they also have less productivity.
44:22 Cynthia Graber? Organic bananas do cost a few cents more per bunch, but they're grown in a way that does less harm to the environment and to workers, which seems like it's worth the pennies.
44:30 Nicola Twilley? Another label you may have seen on your bananas is Rainforest Alliance certified. Chiquita partnered with this nonprofit in the 1990s, and they have also focused on environmental sustainability, though many observers say it's less stringent than organic certification.
44:46 Speaker 03 Rainforest Alliance, I think, have done a great job in, you know, reducing the damage to the environment. They deal with that more than with the social aspect of it. Is it perfect? Of course not. It needs improvement, but I think that is something that we need to recognize that what they have done as well.
45:06 Cynthia Graber? You might also see an Earth University label. As it happens, Lila grew up at Earth University. It's a nonprofit that teaches tropical agriculture, and they grow bananas commercially as well. She said it's great, and if you see that sticker, then great, but it's also not scalable. This isn't a model that the rest of the banana world can copy.
45:23 Nicola Twilley? Still, Lila said if she's buying a banana, she would rather it be an Earth University one. When I'm buying bananas, I always buy organic. So, labels do make a difference. It's just that they don't make enough of a difference.
45:38 Speaker 03 And I don't think that even though it comes from great and very good intentions, just a purchasing decision is not going to change the exploitation of workers. It needs to come from when we put the hat of, you know, of activists or organize in a different way and not as consumers, because unfortunately, at the end of the day, it's about making profit. So I think it's complicated to put that only in a choice when you're in a supermarket. It has to transcend that.
46:15 Cynthia Graber? Again, and it's important to say this, in the days of cutting entire government departments, protecting workers and the environment is the role of the government, not consumers. It's great and important to buy organic bananas, and we should, but in the end, systemic change has to come from both the governments of the purchasing countries and those of the producing countries, and the rules have to be enforced, which takes more government officials.
46:38 Nicola Twilley? But also, even with the best and best enforced regulations in the world, bananas, at least the kind you find in American supermarkets, they have a problem that is kind of inherent.
46:48 Speaker 06 I'm a little skeptical that bananas can be grown in the quantities we have now without major, major environmental impacts.
46:55 Cynthia Graber? As we've seen from the commercial bananas history, growing banana clones in a monoculture at an industrial scale just makes the bananas super vulnerable. Growing them this way and keeping them cheap requires a massive amount of chemicals and bad Working conditions. So maybe the best thing to do is to try to find a way to buy bananas that aren't all clones grown in a monoculture.
47:16 Nicola Twilley? Because both the banana apocalypse that the industry is facing and the problematic environmental and labor conditions that Ben and Lila have researched, they're both really the result of growing bananas at scale in a plantation monoculture to make them cheap and ubiquitous.
47:33 Cynthia Graber? If the supermarkets offered more of a variety, if we could pay a little more for all these different types of bananas, it's not that every non-Cavendish banana is resistant to these diseases, but it'd be much less likely that one disease could just wipe out the commercial industry. There'd just be more resilience in a system like that.
47:51 Nicola Twilley? Both Dan and Mauricio agree. The banana of the future shouldn't be a Panama disease-resistant Cavendish replacement that just slots into the existing plantation system with all its problems.
48:05 Speaker 05 What I think they should be doing instead is growing many bananas. My message would be to try to consume different types of bananas. And in that way, you will be supporting the diversity of them by creating the demand. And there are amazing bananas. I've tasted maybe 260 to 300 banana varieties. There are so many amazing, incredible bananas. If you could get these bananas to market along with other ones, you would be able, possibly at least, to raise prices on some bananas. That might help workers. It might protect them from disease.
48:44 Cynthia Graber? You can sometimes find a non-Cavendish banana at the store. Occasionally, at a high-end grocery store, you might find like one other kind of sweet banana. You can tell because it looks different and it's a different size than the Cavendish.
48:56 Nicola Twilley? In cities that have big Latin American populations, you can often find more interesting bananas at grocery stores serving those communities.
49:03 Cynthia Graber? But this is just the tip of the banana iceberg. Anthony Rodriguez, he's an ethnobotanist and a photographer, he caught the banana bug and he decided to travel the world tasting and photographing as many species and varieties as he could get his hands on for a book.
49:17 Nicola Twilley? He showed us a photo of one of his favorites. It's a wild swamp banana from Borneo. The fruit was slender and just a few inches long and astonishingly beautiful.
49:27 Speaker 04 I guess it's like a light green, bluish green with like these striations.
49:32 Speaker 05 Of purple in there.
49:34 Cynthia Graber? It's spectacular, but it looks like a bean, not a banana.
49:37 Speaker 05 This particular species, the seeds aren't that hard. They're actually chewy. And it forms like a gum when you chew them. It's really sweet banana.
49:44 Cynthia Graber? He also showed us a photo of a much larger mango-sized and shaped banana from Hawaii. Anthony told us it's a type of banana that belongs to a rare family of bananas found mostly in the Pacific Islands called feihi.
49:56 Speaker 05 It has a very deep orange-yellow color to it. And it has like a custardy like flavor and texture. It's also loaded with beta carotene. The interesting thing about feihi is what I noticed is like when you eat large amounts of it, it actually turns your urine to color van de vries.
50:13 Cynthia Graber? Anthony even tried to photograph his bright yellowy-green urine, but the photograph didn't really come out. And who wants to look at that?
50:19 Nicola Twilley? The other cool, non-urine-related fact about this feihi banana is that you can use it different ways depending on how ripe it is.
50:27 Speaker 05 So it starts off as a cooking banana and then turns into a dessert banana.
50:31 Cynthia Graber? And that's the other thing about bananas that we tend not to think about at the grocery store. You can eat all different kinds of bananas and you can eat them all different ways. We mentioned last episode that plantains are starchier and snack bananas are sweeter. In Colombia, Mauricio says they eat them all, all the time.
50:47 Speaker 05 We have the, what we call the manzano, which is a tiny one, so kind of apple banana. It's maybe a couple of inches long and it's very sweet. The popocho, which is a very thick banana, is like similar to a cabin dish banana, but is twice as thick.
51:06 Nicola Twilley? And then for savory banana dishes, you need to forget all those revolting sounding united fruit banana meatloaf and curried banana recipes from last episode. Savory bananas can be the most delicious of all.
51:19 Speaker 05 We have the plantains. And in the plantains, when they are cooked green and smashed, they are called patacon.
51:29 Speaker 05 And that's delicious. And it's usually a flat, hard and salty. And you add things on top, like you can add meat or fish or any veggies, et cetera. But also if it's ripen and it's blackish at the end, the end of the life, that's when it's sweeter or the sweetest. And then you can put it on the oven and it's going to be a delicious, sweet plantain that we call the maduro. So we eat bananas pretty much every day.
52:02 Nicola Twilley? If you, like me, are now feeling like you've lived an impoverished existence when it comes to bananas and you want to start ramping up your banana game, Dan has a suggestion. Yes, buying certified organic or fair trade Cavendish bananas makes a difference. But your grocery store adventures can and should go beyond that. Your task, should you be willing to accept it, is to manifest your banana dreams.
52:29 Cynthia Graber? Practically speaking, that just means talking to the folks at your local grocery store. Tell them there are all sorts of bananas. Why don't they stock three or four different varieties? What about even eight? That personal decision about whether or not you eat bananas should translate into you becoming the weirdo who goes into your health, Whole Foods and asks for the produce manager, as I often do, and says, did you know there's eight different kinds of bananas? Why don't you get one?
52:55 Cynthia Graber? We actually did get to try a bunch of different kinds of bananas for these episodes. We had to special order them. And to find out what we thought of them and how to host your own banana tasting party, it's all in our special supporters newsletter. This goes out to super fans who support us at the $5 per episode or $10 per month level or above. Go to gastropod.com/support.
53:15 Nicola Twilley? Thanks this episode to Dan Capel, Mauricio Diaz-Gronados, Lila Zaglul Ruiz, Ben Brizwa and Anthony Rodriguez. We have links to all their books and photographs and research on our website.
53:27 Cynthia Graber? Thanks, as always, to our fantastic producer, Claudia Guy. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.
53:34 Cynthia Graber? Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country. Built specifically.
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