Gone Bananas, Part One

September 16, 2009

Banana entrepreneurs have always been resourceful. They’ve had to be. Like all business owners or entrepreneurs, the banana barons were creative, agile, and expert problem solvers. Imagine trying to deliver and sell the first 160 bunches (a bunch is approximately 3 to 20 bananas) via a fishing schooner from Jamaica to New Jersey in 1870. Remember the old cliché “necessity is the mother of invention”? It applies here. Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker had no backhaul freight after making a delivery to Jamaica, so he decided to load up on bananas for the return trip and try to make a profit selling the fruit to Americans, who had never before encountered a banana.

The trip from Jamaica to New Jersey could take up to three weeks by sail, and there was no refrigeration! The first challenge, therefore, was to deliver bananas that weren’t rotten or bruised. Of course, once the fruit arrived in New Jersey, Lorenzo had to sell it to a public that not only had never seen a banana before, but wasn’t quite sure how to proceed with eating it. He successfully sold the bananas for then-handsome price of $2.00 per bunch by marketing them as a novelty fruit. We envision he also had to demonstrate how to consume this new and erotic, we mean exotic, fruit. (Just making sure you're still awake!)

Today this familiar fruit is a quintessential part of the average American diet. Nowadays, 96% of American households purchase bananas at least once a month. And here’s some more banana trivia for you: we consume more bananas per person than apples and oranges combined. We bet you didn’t know that!

The first bananas imported from Jamaica and delivered to the United States were named Gros Michel (which in English means “Big Mike”). Research tells us that no one actually knows who gave these bananas their first moniker; however, we surmise it was a man with a twisted sense of humor.

Here’s another controversial banana fact—or fable. Hang on to your hats here. Some have proposed that, in the Garden of Eden, the famously tempting fruit was not an apple at all, but a banana. It certainly makes sense given that most biblical historians believe that the Garden of Eden was located in the Middle East, where bananas flourish. As the story goes, the apple was first substituted for the banana in the Garden of Eden by Saint Jerome circa 400 BCE in the Vulgate Bible, an updated translation requested by Pope Damascus I. It’s possible that the banana was lost in translation—literally—when St. Jerome rewrote the Bible from Old Latin into New Latin. Like many languages, Latin includes numerous homonyms: words that sound alike, but have different meanings (such as “bear” and “bare”), which may have accounted for the mix-up. Or, could have St. Jerome decided that the banana was inappropriate for his Bible, and swapped it for the more demure apple? We’ll never know, so it’s no big deal, right?

Wrong! It is a big deal, because even if Eve did eat a banana, she wasn’t really eating “fruit”! What? A banana isn’t a fruit, you say? Read more…