22 Taking Stock
ion. Propagation relies on tissue cultures or dividing and spreading the
root mat.
Such were the beginnings of the most ubiquitous fruit in the world,
the Cavendish banana. This particular variety that dominates global
trade is essentially a sterile species. Each banana is indistinguishable
from the rest—each one could just as easily have come from Asia as
from Africa or Latin America. After a single bunch is produced, the
treelike stalk is cut down to make room for a hand-picked replacement
to take over.
Banana plants are bred to produce more fruit, which results in more-
fragile fibrous stalks that can be blown down easily. On the plantation
we visited, the sea of green plants was lined with synthetic orange-
colored twine wrapped around each stalk and staked to the ground.
As the flowers transformed into a bunch, each was enclosed in an
insecticide-impregnated blue bag that raised the inside temperature
and provided protection against outside chills.
One more fact distinguishes bananas. They are part of an interna-
tional system that stretches around the world. The temperature-
controlled containers we saw being loaded in the middle of a field
were trucked to a port in Puerto Limón (near where Columbus once
docked his damaged ship) and loaded onto cargo ships with hundreds
of similar containers, before docking in US ports on the East Coast a
few days after departing Costa Rica.
Wholesale companies would receive the offloaded containers and
transport them to giant warehouses. Chambers filled with ethylene
gas would turn the still-green bananas to varying degrees of ripeness.
The close-to-ripe bananas would be transported to supermarket
warehouses, then onto grocery-store receiving docks. Store employees
would cart each box to the produce section, open the box, and display
its contents for sale. By the time a consumer grabs a hand or two and
scurries on to their next purchase, each box has been moved dozens of
times, traveled thousands of miles, possibly undergone one or more
inspections, and been the responsibility of thousands of people. For
the average American, such breadth and complexity is invisible. Each
person will consume ten thousand bananas by the age of forty, rarely,
if ever, considering the workers’ hands that touched them.