My Food, My Way 2 drenched in sweat. Visibly exhausted, he dropped his waist strap to the
ground and bent over panting, trying to catch his breath.
At the off-load, workers with knives took over, reducing each
bunch to a number of smaller hands that fell into a trough of water for
rinsing. Farther down the line, other workers pruned the hands again,
tossing aside any bananas judged unacceptable. As the morning wore
on, the piles of discarded bananas grew larger and became a convenient
platform for some of the shorter line workers to stand on.
Near the end of the processing line, workers expertly packed rec-
tangular boxes with the curvilinear fruit. As each box was filled, another
person checked its weight, adding or subtracting one or two bananas
to match the printed weight label on the side. The completed box was
then closed, stamped, and loaded into an already cold shipping con-
tainer whose refrigeration unit hummed in the background.
For my uncles, this was their first trip to Central America and the
only time they would visit a working plantation. Fascinated with each
phase of the operation, they peppered Eric, the plantation manager,
with nonstop questions. As our time with him wound down, I could
sense their deep respect for a fellow food producer.
Walking back to my SUV, little was spoken. After a long pause, one
brother turned to the other and remarked, “I don’t think I can ever
look at a banana the same way again.”
The planation had triggered old memories of growing up on a farm.
The hard labor was a reminder of walking up and down long rows bent
over thinning sugar beets. Or loading shocks of wheat onto horse-drawn
wagons, then threshing grain under the midday sun, with bodies caked
with dust and eyes red from irritation.
Comparisons to physical demands notwithstanding, bananas are
dramatically different from beets or wheat. Though bananas appear to
come from trees, they are both an herb (the leafy stalk lacks a woody
stem) and a fruit (the tiny black specks in the center are remnants
of seeds). Thousands of years of experimentation has produced varie-
ties that yield more fruit, but also seeds that have all but disappeared.
Bananas can no longer pollinate and reproduce in typical fruit fash-