Agora Supermarket, Panchlaish, Chittagong. February 2022
[from FB post: February 16, 2012] -- General Santos City, Philippines
The Tyranny of Cavendish. We all know Cavendish...it's the banana we eat. There are LOADS of varieties of banana, but only ONE (due to agribusiness) is grown worldwide and it's the one almost the entire planet eats now. It was chosen not for flavor, but for its ability to be cut green and to ripen in transport without getting easily bruised. My friend Gene here works on the Dole Plantation and has been cluing me in on the life cycle of the banana. They are NOT very natural, and NOT very organic. And not surprisingly...the Filipinos don't eat them. They eat all other other kinds of bananas we miss out on!!
Strange to be musing about bananas in Chittagong, but I find myself in a kind of banana heaven here. My nearby supermarket routinely has at least three different kinds available and there are even more in the local markets. Growing up in the Northeast USA, I had no idea that there were more kinds of bananas than what they had at the A&P supermarket.
My first brush with "banana freedom" was in Puerto Rico in my late teens, where I ate very tiny bananas there called "guineos" locally. I literally hesitated to taste them because they didn't look like normal bananas! Short and fat, they were nothing like the long cavendish bananas I was used to. The sweetness from staying on the tree longer was an added bonus. I shortly fell in love with tropical bananas. Let's not even discuss plantains! The idea of a banana having to be 'cooked' seemed absurd. Tostones for me will always be the ultimate french fries. Puerto Rico opened my eyes to something I never thought much about - fruit variety.
I came back home to mainland USA, went back to cavendish, and tropical bananas faded into memory.
On our big round-the-world trip after Brian's graduation from law school, we were in Indonesia for about five weeks. We ate all kinds of fresh fruit nonstop and multiple kinds of bananas as well. All my memories of Puerto Rico flooded back. Not a cavendish in sight (pox on you, potato-banana!) I was amazed at the variety of bananas in the marketplaces. Southeast Asia is the home to the banana plant, so feasting on different bananas across the Indonesian archipelago was a simple task. Some still even had seeds which was a bizarre experience of itself. Eating fresh tropical fruit on that trip is one of my strongest memories!
Then we moved to Jakarta and later Singapore. Non-cavendish bananas became the norm. On trips home, I gagged at the idea of eating a non-sweet, hard, cavendish banana. Had the world gone collectively mad? Why would anyone CHOOSE to eat a cavendish?
Cavendish bananas entered mass commercial production in 1903 but did not gain prominence until later when Panama disease attacked the dominant Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety in the 1950s. Because they were successfully grown in the same soils as previously affected Gros Michel plants, many assumed the Cavendish cultivars were more resistant to Panama disease. Contrary to this notion, in mid-2008, reports from Sumatra and Malaysia suggested that Panama disease had started attacking Cavendish cultivars. After years of attempting to keep it out of the Americas, in mid-2019, Panama disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4), was discovered on banana farms in the coastal Caribbean region. With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel. (Wikipedia)
The cavendish was introduced EVERYWHERE post-Panama Disease as easy to grow, easy to transport, and large in size. The cavendish banana became the standard banana worldwide EXCEPT in those places that had their own local varieties. In those places, not a "yellow-potato" was to be seen. As seen above, the world may just be on the cusp of a new banana variety (btw, I do love the name Gros Michel for a banana)
On a trip to the Philippines, my friend Gene (as mentioned above) was working in one of the huge Dole banana plantations. He implored me NEVER to eat commercially raised bananas because of how many chemicals they are treated with. It didn't put me off eating cavendish bananas later, but I never forgot the conversations about how many of his colleagues developed tumors and cancers from working with all those chemicals. That is certainly nothing the Dole Corporation wants any of us to think about.
When I moved to Chittagong, one of the first things I noticed was the huge banana trade on the streets. There are men pushing piles of them around the city. While in the Middle East (staunchly cavendish land - except Abha where the supermarkets occasionally got local Jizan bananas from down in the Tihama) [see: Jizan Heritage Village], I forgot my banana reveries of the past and reverted to being a staunch cavendish eater. One banana later in Chittagong and all my memories rushed back. I was back in banana heaven. I know eventually cavendish bananas are in my future (unless they get replaced), but for now I am enjoying one of the simplest of pleasures, a local banana.
It is amazing how a piece of fruit can bring joy and jog the memory.