[Erin] The un-crunchy banana

One of the areas where Rod and I sometimes disagree is on the topic of food, and in particular what the crunchy-minded ought to do about such things as organic products, local purchases, and the like.

For instance, when Rod wrote about the 100 Mile Diet a while back, I had a few problems with the notion. How would people in larger cities eat? What about a healthy diversity of diet in areas with limited ability to grow much more than a few staples? Would people in northern climates have to go back to home-canning in order to make it through the winter?

These quibbles about the practicality aside, though, I thought--and still think--that choosing a specific radius of one hundred miles is about as arbitrary as choosing two hundred, or five hundred, or one thousand. Our ancestors didn't get food from a hundred miles away very regularly, but some products, like coffee, tea, wine, and the like were shipped from Europe or South America from the time of the very founding of this nation.

Of course, people appreciated these things for the relative luxuries they were; and for a long time, shipping of this distance was only practicable and relatively economical for goods that weren't perishable.

This op-ed by Dan Koeppel in the New York Times is a good reminder of the fact that all of that has changed--and that it may have to change back again:

ONCE you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century -- enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite -- will begin to unravel.

The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world's biggest banana exporter. But something larger is going on that will affect prices for years to come.

The story of how large fruit companies manipulated the environment, genetically selected the fruits that would travel well, controlled workers and limited their rights, and aggressively marketed the banana as an important health food, well told by Koeppel, reads like a tale of Big Global Agribusiness in microcosm. Take what was done to turn a once-exotic foreign fruit into a daily American staple, and multiply it across dozens and dozens of products, from produce items to relatively rare spices to packaged goodies created in America but now manufactured far from our shores, and the typical American grocery store starts to look like a truly cosmopolitan shopping experience.

Which would be fine, I suppose, if we could afford it. But the impact of our way of doing things isn't small. From Koeppel's editorial:

Once bananas had become widely popular, the companies kept costs low by exercising iron-fisted control over the Latin American countries where the fruit was grown. Workers could not be allowed such basic rights as health care, decent wages or the right to congregate. (In 1929, Colombian troops shot down banana workers and their families who were gathered in a town square after church.) Governments could not be anything but utterly pliable. Over and over, banana companies, aided by the American military, intervened whenever there was a chance that any "banana republic" might end its cooperation. (In 1954, United Fruit helped arrange the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala.) Labor is still cheap in these countries, and growers still resort to heavy-handed tactics.

There are real costs involved in the global grocery habit, and with the addition of skyrocketing fuel costs we may have to consider giving up some of those exotic foods we import and take for granted--like bananas. But I'm not sure we have to limit our food purchases to a hundred-mile radius, either; I'd be happy if we could start by buying American.