Why Are Bananas So Cheap?

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And the History Guy is also heard as a regular contributor here at Our American Stories. If you think of the quintessential American fruit, it would probably be the apple. But apples are not our cheapest fruit. Bananas are.

But why? Here's the History Guy with the story of the banana. Here's an interesting trivia question. Do you happen to know what item is most sold at Walmart? I'll give you a hint. It's a berry that grows from an herb or if you come from the United Kingdom, a herb.

Here's another hint. The herb is in the family Musike and the most popular version of this berry is called the Cavendish. And if you still don't know, does it help to know that it was among the first fruits to be domesticated by humans? That it is so historically important that empires have been built on it and governments overthrown because of it.

And that comedians have made entire careers slipping on its peel. Some scientists estimate that the banana was domesticated as early as 8000 BC. And there's written evidence that the cultivation of bananas had reached India by 6000 BC. Thus bananas were possibly domesticated at approximately the same time as rice and potatoes predating the domestication of apples by millennia. The banana fruit is produced from the ovary of a single flower in which the outer layer of the ovary wall develops into an edible fleshy portion. Thus bananas are, by the botanical definition, a berry. There are more than a thousand species of wild banana in Southeast Asia, China and the Indian subcontinent producing a staggering array of fruits. The Musa Valentina, for example, produces a bright pink fuzzy banana.

And the Go-sung hang species is so aromatic that its Chinese name literally translates as, you can smell it from the next mountain. While bananas were likely first domesticated in Southeast Asia or Papua New Guinea, Arab traders carried bananas back home and introduced the fruit to the Middle East in the first or second millennium BC. And then took the fruit to the east coast of Africa.

The fruit was then traded across the continent, eventually being cultivated in Western Africa. In fact, there are two competing stories for the etymology of the word banana. One posit said it comes from the Arabic word bana, or finger, because early bananas would have been about the size of your finger.

The other posits that the word was derived from a West African language. In 327 BC, Alexander and his armies discovered the banana during one of their campaigns in India and introduced the delicious fruit to the Western world, particularly to Mediterranean countries. In the sixth century, the Portuguese discovered bananas on the Atlantic coast of Africa. And then they then cultivated the fruit on the Canary Islands.

And from there, it was introduced to the Americas by Spanish missionaries. Early cultivated bananas would not have been like what we buy at the supermarket today. Rather, wild bananas are full of seeds, hard enough to break your tooth, and would have been smashed and sieved to eat the soft fruit. Over time, farmers would have selected those bananas that had fewer seeds. But such bananas eventually would become so seedless that they could not be grown from seeds.

And the plants had to be reproduced asexually. The banana rich culture we have today, the average American eats 28 and a half pounds of bananas each year, was the product of the 19th century. While bananas were being cultivated in plantations in the 15th and 16th centuries, those are red or green bananas that included a lot of starch, and today would be called plantains. For the most part, they had to be cooked to be softened and eaten. In 1936, a farmer in Jamaica named Jean-Francois Peugeot discovered a banana plant on his plantation that, the result of random genetic mutation, was producing yellow bananas.

The fruit was naturally sweet and soft enough to be eaten without cooking. This banana grew in tightly packed bunches and had a thick peel that resisted bruising, facilitating transport. Hundreds of cultivars of this banana mutation have evolved to give the world one of the greatest food breakthroughs in history, supplying the world with the number one fruit grown to feed Earth's population, the modern yellow banana. The banana, originally called the martinique banana, was so popular that the variety was cultivated all along the Caribbean coast in Central America.

That type became known as the gross michelle, or the big mic, and it was a game changer. Americans had seen bananas imported from Cuba early in the 19th century, but those were seen as merely a novelty. Likewise, bananas had been displayed in London in the 1600s, but again the fruit was little more than an oddity. Economic and dietary changes, combined with the characteristics of the gross michelle, created a massive trade. Imports into the U.S. gradually increased, especially at the end of the Civil War, but interest in imports really took off in the 1870s. In 1871, banana exports to the United States were valued at around $250,000. By the first year of the 20th century, the banana trade had exponentially ballooned to $6,400,000.

Ten years later, it had effectively doubled again. So many bananas were imported onto the docks at the tip of Lower Manhattan that the old slit piers became known as the banana docks. Fast, sometimes refrigerated boats built especially to carry bananas without spoiling were called banana boats. At one point, the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita Brands International, had the world's largest private fleet. The Big Mike facilitated the worldwide banana market and created the American and European love for the fruit.

In 1904, a 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist at Tassle Pharmacy in La Trobe, Pennsylvania, named David Evans Strickler, invented the banana base triple ice cream sundae, better known as the banana split, one of America's most popular desserts. The banana in that split was a Big Mike and then a banana crisis. The Gross Michelle had become a classic example of a monocrop.

Big Mikes were grown from thousands of genetically identical plants. That allowed a specialization that facilitated mass production and distribution, better revealed a vulnerability. If one tree was susceptible to a pest or blight, they all would be. That blight came in the form of Fusarium oxysporum, a fungus that caused the banana plant to rot with what is commonly called Panama disease. The blight was first identified in the 1870s and the Gross Michelle was particularly vulnerable to the blight. By the 1950s, it had spread all over the banana-producing world. As suddenly it had risen, the banana market crashed. Some claimed that the decline of the Big Mike inspired the popular song Yes, We Have No Bananas.

First recorded in 1923, the song was the single best-selling piece of sheet music for many decades. The solution to the problem came from an unexpected source, Derbyshire, England. In 1834, the Duke of Devonshire received a shipment of bananas from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The Duke's friend and chief gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton, cultivated the bananas in the greenhouse at Chatworth House, the Duke's home in Derbyshire. Paxton named the variety Musa Cavendishii, named after the Duke, William Cavendish. The variety was then cultivated in the Canary Islands and commercially cultivated by 1904, but the Cavendish could not compete with the Big Mike, which had a better flavor and a thicker peel that made it easier to ship. But the Cavendish turned out to have one great advantage.

It was resistant to Fusarium oxysporum. Because it was not as hardy, the Cavendish cannot be as easily shipped in the natural cluster like the Gross Michelle. The clusters had to be broken into bunches and then box, making the Cavendish more costly to ship. Still, Cavendish bananas represent nearly half of the bananas produced in the world today, and nearly all of the export market. If you buy a banana outside the tropics, it is almost certainly a Cavendish. The banana trade is so lucrative that it has driven more than a century of politics, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. American-based companies corrupted local governments in order to obtain exclusive production rights and ran huge swaths of Central American countries as virtual corporate nations.

Economic exploitation gave rise to violent labor movements, which drew the United States government into a series of conflicts throughout the region. Although the wars were not exclusively driven by the economic demands of the fruit companies, the series of conflicts became known as the banana wars. In 1911, a private army financed by the Cayamel Fruit Company orchestrated a coup d'etat in Honduras over a conflict with rival United Fruit Company for an exclusive contract for Honduran bananas.

The unstable economies and governments caused by these interventions led American writer O. Henry to coin the term banana republic. Today the banana is the world's fourth major food behind rice, wheat, and milk. Americans alone eat more than three million tons of bananas each year, more than apples and oranges combined. But we all might again soon be singing, yes we have no bananas, as the Cavendish is proving vulnerable to mutated strains of Panama disease. Once again the world's export bananas are tied to a single species and that supply is under threat.

The answer might come in the form of genetically modified Cavendish's or even the return of the Big Mike, as scientists have been trying to breed a fungus resistant version of the Big Mike ever since the first bike took hold in the 1900s. Or perhaps a new banana will rise to become king of the export market and once again we'll have to get used to a new banana. And a great job as always by Greg Hengler and the production a special thanks to this great storytelling about of all things the banana. And by the way you can hear the history guy on his own YouTube channel.

The history guy, history deserves to be remembered. It's Walmart's biggest selling item. Who knew? 28 and a half pounds each year is what each American consumes. Who knew that? And my goodness I know I play my part.

I'm way higher than 28 and a half pounds each year. The story of the banana, the story of America's, and the world's most popular fruit. Here on Our American Stories. Do you want to win two tickets to the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar? Frito Lay is giving you the chance to make history by joining their Pass the Ball Challenge. Explore the ever-growing community on the Golden World Soccer Ball. Then pass the ball to fellow fans to score additional entries.

Scan the QR code on specially marked bags of Lay's, Cheetos, or Doritos, or visit FritoLayScore.com. When the world gets in the way of your music, try the new Bose Quiet Comfort Earbuds 2. Next-gen earbuds uniquely tuned to the shape of your ears. They use exclusive Bose technology that personalizes the audio performance to fit you, delivering the world's best noise cancellation, and powerfully immersive sound so you can hear and feel every detail of the music you love. Bose Quiet Comfort Earbuds 2. Sound shape to you. To learn more, visit Bose.com.