What you didn’t know about the world’s most popular fruit
It’s pretty easy to find fair trade coffee these days. From coffee shops to grocery stores, sourcing your own beans that have been grown ethically and sustainably seems to be getting easier and easier. But what about other foods and crops with a history of unethical treatment and poor environmental practices? Do you know who harvested the sugar in your tea, who sewed your t-shirt or that the vanilla in your cake was pollinated by hand?
Nature Links participants are embarking on a fall series on fair trade, with a strong focus on investigating where the foods we eat and the clothing we wear was produced, as well as how people and the environment were treated in the process. Last week, we spent time learning about the country’s most popular fruit. No, the U.S. no longer places the apple at the top of our fruit hierarchy. Of the 100 billion bananas consumed around the world each year, the average American eats roughly 90 per year. But most of us actually know very little about bananas. We’ll fill you in on a few of the important things we learned in our most recent Nature Links class on bananas.
The banana is an herb, and a berry too!
In botanical terms, herbs are plants that lack woody stems and live above ground for only a limited period, often dying back in winter. Bananas have a soft, succulent stem (called a pseudostem) that is not made of wood. Instead, the stem is made up of layers of leaf sheaths, which eventually rise and unfold into large banana leaves. While we often refer to the plant as a “banana tree”, it isn’t a tree at all! The plant grows from a rhizome-like mass called a “corm” and is far more closely related to ginger than anything that grows from a tree.
Similarly surprising to some is that bananas are berries! A berry is a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary that contains one or more seeds. Bananas develop from a single flower with one ovary and contain multiple seeds. “Seeds?” you might be asking yourself. “The bananas I eat have no seeds!”. The bananas we commonly eat are indeed seedless cultivars, but wild bananas would have contained large, black seeds the size of lentils.
A cluster of bananas grows near the beautiful red flower of the banana plant. While the average American eats 90 pounds of bananas per year, many don’t know what the plant looks like.
Bananas are the second “dirtiest” crop in the world.
Farming bananas is considered one of the most environmentally unfriendly processes behind cotton. Farming bananas requires a large amount of chemical intervention to maintain the monoculture. Vast quantities of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and synthetic fertilizers are used in conventional banana farming. A recent study published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry suggests that the pesticides used in banana farming leach into waterways and have a negative impact on animals in the surrounding areas. Spectacled caiman in Costa Rica that live near to banana plantations have been found to contain a multitude of toxic chemicals in their blood, including some like DDT that have been banned for years. Additionally, some estimates speculate that it takes close to 100 gallons of water to produce a single banana. Large areas of rainforest are often clear-cut to make way for banana plantations, which are then abandoned when the soil becomes depleted or the crop becomes infested by pests. This practice contributes greatly to loss of biodiversity, disruption of ecosystems, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, after being harvested, bananas are generally grown in tropical countries and transported long distances to reach consumers in other parts of the world. A banana grown in Ecuador (the largest exporter of the fruit) and eaten in New York City must travel 2,900 miles. The transportation process contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.
People are also mistreated in banana farming
Bananas are often grown on large plantations owned and operated by large, rich companies. Employees often live on-site and are susceptible to harsh treatment and low wages while being exposed to agricultural chemicals on their skin and in the air. Unionized banana workers can make up to $10 a day, but non-unionized workers often make $3 per day or less with no benefits. On top of that, the industry has documented countless uses of child labor. In a 2002 report published by Human Rights Watch found widespread use of harmful child labor on plantations owned by Dole. Ecuadorian children who were interviewed for the report worked 12-hour days, used sharp tools and lacked access to clean water and bathrooms. Many of these children interviewed were as young as 8 years old. Less than half of these children were attending school, and they earned a little more than half the legal minimum wage.
Fair Trade bananas can be hard to find, but they’re out there.
If all of this information has you questioning your next bite of banana, you’re not alone. After learning about the problems that banana farming poses for people and the environment, Nature Links participants have been on the hunt for fair trade options at their grocery stores. Some have tracked down these more ethical, environmentally-friendly bananas (although fair trade bananas aren’t always organic) at places like Whole Foods, Aldi and various natural food stores. Stores like Hannaford and Shaw’s don’t tend to carry them. While the fair trade version can be more expensive, Nature Links participants have been discussing whether these products should cost more to ensure that farmers are treated more humanely. “Maybe we should be eating fewer bananas altogether,” said one participant. “We could still get what we want and farmers could be treated better,” she said.
