The Dark and Bloody History Behind Bananas
How can we do better as consumers?
There are a lot of foods that changed the world, and few of them were as influential as the banana.
Buy a banana at an American supermarket and you might see the tag “Chiquita” on your banana. For most of my life, I looked at the tag indifferently and didn’t think much about it. That was until a day or two when I looked up the history behind Chiquita Brands International to see that Chiquita is the successor of the infamous United Fruit Company.
Bananas are my favorite fruit. As a runner, bananas are the crown jewel food in the morning to prepare me to run as fast as I can. With the banana as the most popular fruit in the United States, it’s time to look deeper at the history behind bananas, and what that means for us, now, as consumers, to fight the historical and even-present day atrocities and abuses of the banana industry.
According to Dan Koeppel, the author of the book Banana: the Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, the first banana company in the world was Boston Fruit, which, along with other banana companies and mergers, took over nations and suppressed labor movements.
These companies engaged in brutal atrocities. In December, 1928, a group of United Fruit workers were on strike to protest subpar…
