Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I wonder if we eat more bananas than oranges and apples combined because bananas are somewhat easier and less messy to eat? You peel the skin really easily, there's a "handle" to hold while you eat it so you don't get messy, and then you toss the skin into a wastebasket. No peeling, no washing, no cutting necessary?

Funny, though, because I really have to be in the mood for a banana, and it's rare I am. I would say I eat very few bananas, the last one probably being over a year or two ago.

I do not feel guilty about eating anything. Mmm.. bananas.

*munch munch*

I encountered a really weird phenomenon last week. Now that Dole has entered the banana marketing an aggressive way my local grocery store had Dole organic bananas fairly cheap - 59 cents per pound vs. 39 or 49 cents for the non-organic (which have usually been Chiquita at the store I shop in).

The Dole product looked really good - almost suspiciously perfect and blemish free relative to the way bananas, particularly organic ones , usually look. I bought them but there was a strange and not completely subtle difference in the texture - one that I found disagreeable. It's difficult to verbalize but I can only compare it the that sort of subtly spongy texture that a "water enhanced" ham or poultry product has compared to one that is not "enhanced". They were edible enough to eat but I won't buy organic bananas again unless they are a brand other than Dole (by the way - I have eaten non-Dole organic bananas in the past and they were just fine).

I saw some banana's at my local farmer's market a couple of weeks ago, was really close to buying some but at $2/lb. I said no, which was funny, b/c that isn't too bad, but they are always under a $1 at the store.

Ethanol wasn't pushed by environmentalists so much as by corn growers associations and companies such as ADM both saying it would be great for the environment so they could push through subsidies for it and get a double benefit of cheap corn because it was subsidized on one end and then subsidized again on the other and because there was just way too much corn (about a billion bushel surplus in 2005). Many environmentalists have been screaming about the idiocy for years but no one would listen till it was done and proved silly.

Same with bananas, they've been a story for years now from the banana genetic problems due to massive monoculture and loss of forests that grow wild bananas (now extinct -- in fact the cavendish is a replacement for a better banana the Gros Michel that was destroyed in pretty much the same way this one is as recently as the sixties) to the terrorist buyoffs by the companies among them Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte which also involved intimidating workers including killing anyone who seemed to be a leader. It's where the term "banana republic" originated (not from the clothing store, ugh). But it's taken this book to get some good mainstream publicity which I'm really grateful for. Thank you Dan Koeppel.

It's still a huge issue and there are groups trying to make a difference and asking us to be picky about what we buy because of the control of the companies.

Here's an interesting 7 minute video on banana farming in Jamaica and how the low prices and company control is forcing farmers to other forms of agriculture that aren't as legal:

With the future of the banana business in jeopardy, Caribbean farmers are turning to marijuana production.

Nebo was a banana farmer prepared for the WTO's damming decision. "The more the decline in the banana, the more the production of marijuana. Where there is a market I will plant." And at 2000ft up, away from the gaze of police, the holy herb is flourishing. The hardy marijuana rastas, tending these crops earn 10 to 20 times as much as banana farmers. Tipping up a fertilizer bucket of compressed ganja Bungo proudly displays his cannabis castle worth $20,000. It's a risky business though for not only are the US squeezing the banana industry, they are at the forefront of a Caribbean drugs crackdown. Last December US marines descended from the skies in a wave of helicopter attacks on the illegal ganja fields. They say they destroyed over a million plants. The growers though are unrepentant: "We are concerned about drugs like you are. But you can't expect us to be giving everything and getting nothing in return."

Thanks for the steer on the other book aharste. Thanks too Ed Levine for spreading the word some more. :)

I don't eat them because they aren't local, their forced, profit-motivated cultivation is destroying forests and their denizens, they harbor fruit fly eggs in the skin which then hatch in the home, and I don't really like them especially in comparison to the great fruit that is local.

As far as those organic ones that were off, it's most likely the way they were stored and processed along the way rather than that they were organic. There was a huge and expensive banana ripening room utilizing ethylene and pressure in a tunnel built a few years ago near me. State of the art and only for bananas...