….Why You Shouldn’t Buy Bananas
1. For many people (North Americans, Europeans), bananas are not a local product so they have to be shipped/flown in from thousands of miles away. In the buy-local/green world in which we now live, bananas are far from being eco-friendly.
2. By buying bananas at a low price compared with other fruit such as apples, we’re encouraging the continuation of a business model that favors the employer rather than the employee. There’s a reason why they call them banana plantation - and it’s not about the fact bananas are plants.
3. The vast majority of bananas consumed by consumers are one variety - the Cavendish. There are two major problems with this reality. One, the Cavendish variety lacks genetic diversity. The Cavendish banana grown in Jamaica is the exact same as the one grown in Thailand or Honduras. This could make it prone to disease and pests. Second, our obsession with the seedless Cavendish means we ignore the 1,000+ other types of bananas grown in Africa and Asia.
4. Because bananas are so inexpensive and always available, they dominate the fruit landscape. On average, Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fruit, chomping down 26.2 pounds/year while Apples are a distant second at 16.7 pounds. Around the world, people eat 100 billion Cavendish bananas every year.
For more on the banana and its challenge, check out Popular Science - “Can This Fruit be Saved” - and well as Freakonomics, which had a great post recently looking at the economics of bananas.
