[Erin] The un-crunchy banana

Plantation crops grown in 3rd world countries have about the same sad stories of near-slavery, exploitation, and the US gov't suppressing any labor movements in favor of corporations. I have never felt the same way about pineapple again after learning about the US coup over the Hawaiian monarchy, all in the interests of pineapple and sugar corporations.

I'm not sure how many of these "exotics" (pineapple, bananas, chocolate, some spices) can be economically grown in the USA. So we are going to continue to rely on imports.

Also, yes, if you want to strictly "eat within 100 miles" outside of CA or FL or the Northwest Coast, you had better can, freeze, or have a good root cellar. And you'll be eating a lot of cabbages, potatoes, and turnips ... ; )

Your description of how agribusiness manipulated crops for their own benefit, creating a loss in the diversity of products available to the public, is similar to what General Motors did purchasing city bus/trolley systems, then closing them down to increase the public demand for a more personal mode of transportation and the benefit of GM.

I read that story and see human ingenuity in full display (sans the shootings, but that's not atypical behavior for the period). Bananas went from exotic to a daily staple.

We'll still have exotic foods with high oil prices. When shipping costs increase, the only goods that will pay to ship are the expensive ones. I don't see the benefit in reducing our choices either, and it's far worse for people in Latin America. Basically poor people everywhere will lose out. Poor people in the developed countries will be unable to buy higher quality and more flavorful imported foods, and poor people in developing countries will be unable to trade. Economies like China and India will enter a permanent depression without access to the free markets, assuming they don't have revolutions.

I was/am a huge fan of 100 Mile Diet...until I was diagnosed with celiac disease. At least two of my four children have gluten-intolerance. Now almost every packaged food I eat (which isn't much anymore) is imported from far away.

My favorite gluten-free pasta (and the only one worth eating, really) is from Canada. Bananas have become a staple of the diet again. All my flours come from Bob's Red Mill in teeny little packages from out of state.

If I had unlimited income, I could try to buy local produce, meat and dairy but with the added expense of gluten-free food products, most local boutique/artisan foods have gone out of reach financially. I have had to compromise what I would like to do with what I had to do for health and financial reasons.

My saving grace: I have my own garden--though little harvested yet here in Lower Narnia where it's perpetually stuck halfway between winter and spring (aka western Washington state).

Does anyone grow bananas commercially in the US?

9070 metric tons in 2006 according to FAO data at http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=567

Mostly in Hawaii, a smattering of plants in Florida. However, that total is somewhat south of Mexico's 2M metric tons, to say nothing of India's 16.8M tons. I suspect the reason we can't grow more bananas in the Aloha State is the same as why those islands have no meaningful citrus industry: Mediterranean fruit fly and other non-native pest infestations.

The United Fruit Co.
by Pablo Neruda

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the “Banana Republics”
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flows as though
on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbors, wrapped
for burial in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.

—translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly

I agree that assigning a 100 mile radius is arbitrary, but there's more to it. The recent spate of peak oil and economic decline discussions have made the idea of local food much more relevant, particularly with the corn and soy crops lost to the floods. The people who are trying to eat local now are doing so out of a desire to see if they could actually eat locally if there were to be large-scale petroleum energy shortages due to unmet demand, war, terrorism etc.

If you have the money, you can eat whatever you can afford to buy, regardless of where it comes from. But there's no escaping that petroleum based agriculture will one day come to an end. We got by without oil-based agriculture until about 1850. In a few decades at the latest, we'll be without oil-based agriculture again.

As for eating local now when you don't have to, sometimes virtue is the only reward.

I think our whole view of gardening is too conditioned by California (for instance, every time, it seems, I see a gardening book, TV show, etc., the author is usually from the Bay Area or LA. Or the Northwest Coast.) Yes, if you have a year-round growing season, you can pace yourself with fruits and vegetables. But in the Real World where most of us live (LOL), fruit comes in all at once, mostly. That means you eat it fresh till you're sick of it, and can or freeze the rest. Then it's "same time, next year."

Every meal I prepare reminds me of how relatively "luxuriously" we eat. We eat fresh fruit and vegetables at least twice a day, all year round. This would have been unheard of a hundred years ago, or maybe even fifty. If we were truly to "eat local," we would have to resort to a greenhouse, hydroponics, or drug-dealer-level "grow lights" to eat the same level of fresh produce.

It's like in that Michael Moore movie, Sicko, when Moore is interviewing the French couple in their Paris apartment. Moore asks them what they spend their money on, and the wife opens the refrigerator (stuffed with produce; hardly a packaged product to be seen.) "The vegetables," she says apologetically. "The vegetables are very expensive."

"Eating local" in the summertime is a wonderful thing. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't fool ourselves about the other 8-9 months of the year.

Stefanie raises some good points but I think everyone is too focused on "fresh", I'm much happier knowing it's something I grew chemical/pesticide free and stored/packaged/handled by me. A cold cellar can store certain varieties of apples and pears for months. The apples/pears you don't want to store whole, dry them, and when the 'fresh' apples/pears run out, use your dried apples on actual fresh salad greens you can be growing in a simple cold frame through most of the dreary winter months. They're still giving you a serving of fruits afterall. POtatoes, squash, onions, garlic, cabbage also store well in cold storage, and once again, grown by you. YOu can overwinter a few dwarf citrus trees if you have a sun room or good southern exposure and they'll be giving you fresh citrus all winter long. While there's nothing better than a fresh summer tomato from the garden, the next best thing are all the tomatoes and tomato sauces canned from the garden, again pesticide/chemical free and no worries of salmonella, and you'll enjoy those delicious tomatoes all winter long. I hear with heavy mulch, your fall crop of carrots can be overwintered in the ground, pull em as you need them. Peas/beans can be canned, dried or frozen. Extra grapes or berries? Make wine! Drink and enjoy that wine as you combine your fresh seasonals with your 'fresh' stored produce.

A lot of the above can be done by anybody with a little land and good sun exposure, sure, you won't be growing your own wheat or other grains, but the 100 mile diet could be lived in spirit if we took the time to produce some of our own food, especially those staples we really enjoy. Just because you live in Minnesota and want to try and do a 100 mile diet, doesn't mean you can't have citrus, just get a dwarf citrus and overwinter inside.

It's great we can walk into a grocery store and get produce 24/7, but how fresh is it? How much handling has it received, how far has it been transported, was it irradiated, what residual chemicals are on it, is it carrying pathogenic bacteria or viruses, is it imported and therefore a vector for new plant disease or carrying exotic insects?

Growing citrus indoors isn't an easy task. We have a dwarf Lemon tree, and I think we've gotten 3 lemons from it in the 10 years we've owned it.
Granted, we don't have a sunroom - but I have to wonder how the heat lost through sunroom windows would compare to the energy spent to transport fresh citrus from places where it is normally grown.