December 15, 2023 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, if you think of the quintessential American fruit, it would probably have to be the apple. But apples are not our cheapest fruit—bananas are! Here’s the History Guy with the story of the banana.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes to us from a man who's simply known
as the History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds
of thousands of people of all ages over on YouTube,
and the History Guy is also heard as a regular
contributor here at our American Stories. If you think of
(00:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
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. That the herb is in the family Musicae.
And the most popular version of this berry is called
the cavendish. And if you still don't know, does it
(01:06):
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 eight thousand BC, and
(01:30):
there's written evidence that the cultivation of bananas had reached
India by six thousand BC. Thus, bananas were possibly domesticated
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 flour, in which the
outer layer of the ovary wall develops into an edible,
(01:50):
fleshy portion. Thus bananas are, by the botanical definition, a berry.
There are more than a thousand species of water wild
banana in Southeast Asia, China, and the Indian subcontinent, producing
a staggering array of fruits. The Mussa valentina, for example,
produces a bright, pink, fuzzy banana, and the ghost sung
(02:12):
Hag 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 Ghana, Arab traders carried bananas back home and
introduced the fruit to the Middle East, and the first
or second millennium BC and then took the fruit to
(02:32):
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 posets that it comes from the Arabic
word bana for finger, because early bananas would have been
about the size of your finger. The other posets that
the word was derived from a West African language. In
(02:54):
three twenty seven BC, Alexander and his armies discovered the
banana during one of their campaigns in India, and 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
(03:16):
would not have been like what we buy at the
supermarket today. Rather, wild bananas are full of seeds hard
enough to break their tooth, and would have been smashed
and seeve 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
(03:39):
the average American eats twenty eight and a half pounds
of bananas each year was the product of the nineteenth century,
while bananas were being cultivated implantations in the fifteenth and
sixteenth 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 nineteen thirty six, a farmer
(04:01):
in Jamaica named Jean Francois Pougeot 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
(04:24):
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
(04:44):
the Gross Michelle, or the big mic and it was
a game changer. Americans had seen bananas imported from Cuba
early in the nineteenth century, but those were seen as
merely a novelty. Likewise, bananas had been displayed in London
in the sixteen hundreds, but again the fruit was little
more than an oddity. Economic and dietary changes, combined with
(05:06):
the characteristics of the gross Michelle, created a massive trade.
Imports into the US gradually increased, especially at the end
of the Civil War, but interest and imports really took
off in the eighteen seventies. In eighteen seventy one, banana
exports to the United States were valued at around two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. By the first year of
the twentieth century, the banana trade had exponentially ballooned to
(05:27):
six million, four hundred thousand dollars. 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
(05:48):
Company now known as Chiquita Brands International, had the world's
largest private fleet. The big mic facilitated the worldwide banana
market and created the American and European love for the fruit.
In nineteen oh four, a twenty three year old, a
Prentice pharmacist at Tassel Pharmacy in the Trope, Pennsylvania named
David Evans Strickler, invented the banana based triple ice cream Sunday,
(06:10):
better known as the Banana Split, one of America's most
popular desserts. The banana in that split was a big
mic and then a banana crisis. The Grossmachelle had become
a classic example of a monocrop. Big mics were grown
from thousands of genetically identical plants that allowed a specialization
(06:30):
that facilitated mass production and distribution, but a revealed of vulnerability.
If one tree was susceptible to a past or blight,
they all would be That blight came in the form
of Fusarium oxysporom, a fungus that caused the banana plant
to rot with what is commonly called Panama disease. The
blight was first identified in the eighteen seventies, and the
(06:51):
gross Michelle was particularly vulnerable to the blight. By the
nineteen fifties, it had spread all over the banana producing world.
As Suddenly it is, the banana market crashed. Some claim
that the decline that the Big mic inspired the popular
song Yes We Have No Bananas. First recorded in nineteen
twenty three. The song was the single best selling piece
(07:12):
of sheet music for many decades. The solution to the
problem came from an unexpected source, Derbyshire, England. In eighteen
thirty four, 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.
(07:35):
Paxton named the variety Musa Cavendishy, named after the Duke
William Cavendish. The variety was then cultivated in the Canary
Islands and commercially cultivated by nineteen oh four. But the
Cavendish could not compete with the big mic 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 oxy sporum.
(08:00):
Because it was not as hardy, that Cavendish cannot be
as easily shipped in the natural cluster like the gross Michelle.
The clusters had to be broken into bunches and then bogs,
making the cavetish 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
(08:21):
a Cavendish. The banana trade is so lucrative that is
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
(08:42):
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 nineteen eleven, a private
army financed by the Cayamel Fruit Company orchestrated a gooda
taw in Honduras over a conflict with rival United Fruit
(09:04):
Company for an exclusive contract for Honduran bananas. The unstable
economies and governments caused by these interventions let 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
(09:28):
all might again soon be singing yes, we have no bananas,
as the Cavendish is proving vulnerable to mutated strains Panama disease.
Once again. The world's export bananas are tied to a
single species, and that supplies under threat. The answer might
come in the form of genetically modified cavendishes, or even
the return of the Big Mike, as scientists have been
(09:48):
trying to breed a fungus resistant version of the big
mic ever since the first bike took hold in the
nineteen hundreds. 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.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
And a great job is always by Greg Hengler and
the production of 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 twenty eight and a half
(10:25):
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 twenty eight and a half pounds each year.
The story of the banana, the story of Americas and
the world's most popular fruit. Here on our American Stories.
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes to us from a man who's simply known
as the History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds
of thousands of people of all ages over on YouTube,
and the History Guy is also heard as a regular
contributor here at our American Stories. If you think of
(00:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
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. That the herb is in the family Musicae.
And the most popular version of this berry is called
the cavendish. And if you still don't know, does it
(01:06):
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 eight thousand BC, and
(01:30):
there's written evidence that the cultivation of bananas had reached
India by six thousand BC. Thus, bananas were possibly domesticated
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 flour, in which the
outer layer of the ovary wall develops into an edible,
(01:50):
fleshy portion. Thus bananas are, by the botanical definition, a berry.
There are more than a thousand species of water wild
banana in Southeast Asia, China, and the Indian subcontinent, producing
a staggering array of fruits. The Mussa valentina, for example,
produces a bright, pink, fuzzy banana, and the ghost sung
(02:12):
Hag 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 Ghana, Arab traders carried bananas back home and
introduced the fruit to the Middle East, and the first
or second millennium BC and then took the fruit to
(02:32):
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 posets that it comes from the Arabic
word bana for finger, because early bananas would have been
about the size of your finger. The other posets that
the word was derived from a West African language. In
(02:54):
three twenty seven BC, Alexander and his armies discovered the
banana during one of their campaigns in India, and 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
(03:16):
would not have been like what we buy at the
supermarket today. Rather, wild bananas are full of seeds hard
enough to break their tooth, and would have been smashed
and seeve 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
(03:39):
the average American eats twenty eight and a half pounds
of bananas each year was the product of the nineteenth century,
while bananas were being cultivated implantations in the fifteenth and
sixteenth 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 nineteen thirty six, a farmer
(04:01):
in Jamaica named Jean Francois Pougeot 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
(04:24):
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
(04:44):
the Gross Michelle, or the big mic and it was
a game changer. Americans had seen bananas imported from Cuba
early in the nineteenth century, but those were seen as
merely a novelty. Likewise, bananas had been displayed in London
in the sixteen hundreds, but again the fruit was little
more than an oddity. Economic and dietary changes, combined with
(05:06):
the characteristics of the gross Michelle, created a massive trade.
Imports into the US gradually increased, especially at the end
of the Civil War, but interest and imports really took
off in the eighteen seventies. In eighteen seventy one, banana
exports to the United States were valued at around two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. By the first year of
the twentieth century, the banana trade had exponentially ballooned to
(05:27):
six million, four hundred thousand dollars. 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
(05:48):
Company now known as Chiquita Brands International, had the world's
largest private fleet. The big mic facilitated the worldwide banana
market and created the American and European love for the fruit.
In nineteen oh four, a twenty three year old, a
Prentice pharmacist at Tassel Pharmacy in the Trope, Pennsylvania named
David Evans Strickler, invented the banana based triple ice cream Sunday,
(06:10):
better known as the Banana Split, one of America's most
popular desserts. The banana in that split was a big
mic and then a banana crisis. The Grossmachelle had become
a classic example of a monocrop. Big mics were grown
from thousands of genetically identical plants that allowed a specialization
(06:30):
that facilitated mass production and distribution, but a revealed of vulnerability.
If one tree was susceptible to a past or blight,
they all would be That blight came in the form
of Fusarium oxysporom, a fungus that caused the banana plant
to rot with what is commonly called Panama disease. The
blight was first identified in the eighteen seventies, and the
(06:51):
gross Michelle was particularly vulnerable to the blight. By the
nineteen fifties, it had spread all over the banana producing world.
As Suddenly it is, the banana market crashed. Some claim
that the decline that the Big mic inspired the popular
song Yes We Have No Bananas. First recorded in nineteen
twenty three. The song was the single best selling piece
(07:12):
of sheet music for many decades. The solution to the
problem came from an unexpected source, Derbyshire, England. In eighteen
thirty four, 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.
(07:35):
Paxton named the variety Musa Cavendishy, named after the Duke
William Cavendish. The variety was then cultivated in the Canary
Islands and commercially cultivated by nineteen oh four. But the
Cavendish could not compete with the big mic 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 oxy sporum.
(08:00):
Because it was not as hardy, that Cavendish cannot be
as easily shipped in the natural cluster like the gross Michelle.
The clusters had to be broken into bunches and then bogs,
making the cavetish 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
(08:21):
a Cavendish. The banana trade is so lucrative that is
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
(08:42):
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 nineteen eleven, a private
army financed by the Cayamel Fruit Company orchestrated a gooda
taw in Honduras over a conflict with rival United Fruit
(09:04):
Company for an exclusive contract for Honduran bananas. The unstable
economies and governments caused by these interventions let 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
(09:28):
all might again soon be singing yes, we have no bananas,
as the Cavendish is proving vulnerable to mutated strains Panama disease.
Once again. The world's export bananas are tied to a
single species, and that supplies under threat. The answer might
come in the form of genetically modified cavendishes, or even
the return of the Big Mike, as scientists have been
(09:48):
trying to breed a fungus resistant version of the big
mic ever since the first bike took hold in the
nineteen hundreds. 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.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
And a great job is always by Greg Hengler and
the production of 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 twenty eight and a half
(10:25):
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 twenty eight and a half pounds each year.
The story of the banana, the story of Americas and
the world's most popular fruit. Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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