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INTRODUCTION
The field of food studies is growing as more scholars become interested in the historical, social, and cultural meanings of food. Historians, philosophers, folklorists, and literary scholars are turning to the once-mundane topic of food to study human nature and specific cultures by the way people gather, cook, eat, market, and talk about food. Food can be a symbol of power, an aesthetic display, a community ritual, or an expression of ideology or identity. The study of food can provide a window into issues of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. Food and its attendant meanings provide the basis for many of our daily actions, for wars of conquest and trade, for political conflicts, and for the identification of the foreigner, the “other.”
A study of the banana at first may appear frivolous, but the social history of the use of everyday food can offer a window into the culture of the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “When unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire—or are given—contextual meanings by those who use them.” This study is a look at the context of the banana in the United States, a way to elicit meanings from the ways bananas have been absorbed into popular culture, to explain ourselves, our politics, culture, fears, and dreams.
The first Boy Scout Handbook, published in 1911, supplied a list of good deeds that a boy might do each day, including chopping wood for mother’s stove, helping an old lady across the street, and picking banana peels up off the sidewalk. Why were banana peels mentioned specifically rather than litter or garbage in general? How many peels were there? Who was dropping them? Was this really a problem? What was going on in 1911 on our city streets?
I remember several instances from my childhood that may have piqued my own interest in bananas. When I was about nine years old, I read all the Lucy Fitch Perkins books I could find about twins in various countries and historical settings. The Filipino Twins family lived in a thatched-roof house on stilts and it was the job of the boy twin to polish the floor using banana leaves. I actually remembered it as banana skins that he used to skate on around the floor and only discovered years later that it was the leaves. This sounded like a wonderful way to do housecleaning and fit into my American perceptions of the slippery properties of the banana peel.
About the same time, I was entranced by a banana stalk hanging in a neighborhood grocery store window. It had a single hand of bananas left on it and I wanted that stalk. It took me some time to gather enough courage to enter the store and ask for it, but once I had the stalk in hand, oh, it was a thing of wonder. With it I could conjure up images of jungles and foreign travel. To me, bananas represented exotic, mysterious, romantic places.
Then there’s the third banana memory. It is a recipe that my mother may have gotten from the New York Times Magazine of September 14, 1947, for bananas spread with mustard, rolled in a ham slice secured with toothpicks, and baked in cheese sauce. This dish made an occasional appearance on the family dinner table. It was the only thing I ever cooked that my husband refused to eat.
Questions of where, when, and how bananas are eaten illustrate changes in diet, eating habits, and etiquette. Bananas have been instrumental in public health campaigns for clean streets and tuberculosis control. International fruit companies were leaders in the development of modern advertising and marketing strategies. They stimulated trade and political relations between the United States and the countries of the Caribbean and laid the basis for the development of modern multinational corporations. The story of the banana illustrates aspects of the development of our national transportation system, including railroads, steamships, and trucking. Banana jokes, songs, and symbolism also allow us to look at our changing mores and concerns.
Before the 1880s, most Americans had never seen, much less eaten, a banana but by 1910 the country was flooded with them. Transformed from a luxury and a novelty, bananas had become the poor man’s fruit. In that year it was estimated that three billion bananas were imported into the United States—“a shipment which would cover an area twenty feet wide reaching from New York to San Francisco, or, placed end to end, would extend thirteen times around the Earth at the Equator.” Throughout most of the twentieth century, residents of the United States have eaten more pounds of bananas per capita than any other fruit. Unlike kiwi fruit or mangoes, bananas quickly lost the allure of the exotic. Thanks to early marketing decisions by United Fruit, bananas are perceived as always available and always cheap. In 1995 Americans spent over $3.4 billion on imported bananas: a banana a week for every person in the country. By 1999 annual consumption had risen to seventy-five bananas per person, or a banana and a half a week. That is over twenty-seven and a half pounds of bananas per person each year, nine pounds more than our annual consumption of apples, the next most popular fruit. Bananas have become as “American” as apples or strawberries despite the fact that virtually all our bananas are imported from the countries of the Caribbean basin.
Bananas have become ubiquitous, truly a part of our lives for the past hundred years. Bananas are so common that they are almost invisible. Few supermarket shoppers think about where the bananas came from. In the 1990s we got 60 percent of our winter vegetables from Mexico, and are so used to the availability of foreign fruits and vegetables that we seldom think about their origin. Bananas are our friends—ordinary, funny, homey. By looking closely at the banana, we can learn a great deal about our way of life, our trade and transport systems, and our politics. As the banana quickly changed from a luxury to the cheapest fruit available, it found an enduring niche in American humor and folklore. Bananas are part of our national cuisine, and they also appear in popular songs, jokes, vaudeville acts, and films. We have eaten them for a wide variety of healthful reasons and some have even tried to smoke the peels. This book is about the importance of bananas in American culture and the meanings that bananas have assumed for us.
