Mellow Yellow

Who knew bananas were such a pervasive, controversial and relatively recent popular fruit.  In his book Banana Cultures (2005), John Soluri unfurls a very detailed look at how a hardly eaten fruit in the United States in the mid 1800s became the second most popular fruit by 1920.  With that said I believe his interest in the people who work to produce the bananas with the pressures and changes in their lives was a key emphasis in each chapter of this book.    He states “This book traces the entwined environment and social transformations that shaped the North Coast of Honduras between 1870 and 1975.” (3)   The book was very clear that the business of bananas changed the North Coast and he methodically presented how politics, the terrain, disease, monopolies, and the United States effected this change.  Of course Honduras was not the only location to produce bananas, but it was the leading supplier to the United States for a good part of the last 150 years.  It was this relationship with the United States, particularly United and Standard Fruit companies, that help the banana boom, but it also presented problems with land use, labor and political favor.

Soluri effectively traces the banana business from start to finish.  I was fascinated with the “agricultural” process of bananas, the clearing, growing and harvesting.  He at times seemed to get too detailed in the number of hectares and bunches harvested/shipped, but it reveals how fast the North Coast of Honduras was transformed from a rainforest to farms.  Of course this change attracted a many new people to the area looking for work.  Being in the “green industry” myself I found the use of chemicals to control plant disease understandable, but I cringed at the lack of protection for the copper sulfate and later pesticide sprayers (an unfortunate consequence of ignorance to the dangers and an unregulated industry). 

The analysis of the book by Brendon particularly the utilization of map in the book to show how time, transportation networks (the railroad) and product demand reflected and transformed on the landscape of the North Coast.  I liked Carol’s statistics on the current Honduran economy and how it has diversified to include apparel and auto electronics.

The funniest part of the book was the cultural references to bananas in the United States.  The racy song in the 1920 and 30s referring the phallic illusions of the banana revealed the old days were not as prim and proper as one would think.  Moving forward to the 1960s and the hippie scene, the author finally answered my question to what “mellow yellow” meant – who knew people smoked banana peels.

Soluri did an excellent job of tying in the banana business with the world of other commodities of the twentieth century in his last chapter.  His look at the similarities of the California deciduous fruit/nut industry pointed to the growing globalization, branding, marketing and transportation American (North, Central or South) faced in the modern world.