1125: Bananas | Skeptical Sunday

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Today, we're peeling back the layers on one of the most popular fruits on the planet, the banana. From smoothies to flambés, bananas are everywhere, but how much do we really know about them? Are they ethical? Are they sustainable? Can they be free from chemicals? And what impact do they have on the environment? Well, hold on to your bowls of fruit, because today we're going deep into the sweet and mushy and surprisingly complex secrets of our slender yellow friends.
Joining me today is writer and researcher Jessica Wynn. Jess, welcome to the show.
Are you ready to go B-A-N-A-N-A-S? I think that's how it goes. That's how you spell bananas, correct? I am so ready.
Who doesn't love a good banana, right? But it turns out bananas have a shady side.

Don't tell me bananas are bad for you because I got a whole bowl of these things sitting here and they're going to be brown in 20 minutes or whatever, however long they last.

Health-wise, not at all. They're packed with fiber, potassium, vitamin C, B6, and they're great for the gut and heart.
They're like nature's candy that also happens to be good for you. Okay, so this is not about health.
Correct. It's not about your health anyway.
The only health-related downsides are they're high in carbs, so maybe skip them if you're on a keto kick. And they don't mix well with a few medications, but that's hardly the banana's fault.
It's rare, but some people are allergic. It's less than 1% of the population, though.
So the world's love of bananas is thriving. And of all the varieties, we only eat one type of banana.
A banana used to be my go-to pre-workout snack. But wait, so one type of banana, like one species, that seems weird because don't we have hundreds of different kinds of apples and oranges, for example? Thousands of banana varieties grow, but the Cavendish banana is the only one that makes it to the grocery store.
It's the global standard. And they are the world's easiest food to undress.
One quick peel, man, you're in business. That's true.
Bananas are pretty sexy. They're like nature's fast food served in biodegradable wrappers.
I suppose that's a bonus because we eat what millions of bananas every year. Billions with a B.
There's over 100 billion bananas eaten worldwide every year, and they've been around forever. Evidence of bananas dates back to 6th century BCE in Papua New Guinea, but likely thousands of years earlier in Asia and northern Australia.
So they're not native to the U.S. They seem very tropical.
Yeah. In fact, they were considered exotic in the West for a long time.
There's some debate about when they first made it to Europe. In the 1500s, Magellan even wrote letters home describing bananas as, quote, like a really long fig.
Wow. Not even close, first of all.
Not even remotely the same thing. Is that a really long fig in your pocket? Yeah.
Yeah, long fig hammock doesn't quite work either. No, it does not.
Long fig hammock. But yeah, as Europeans colonized tropical regions, bananas became more and more desired.
But transporting them pre-refrigeration was obviously pretty tricky. Yeah, I can imagine opening up a box of squishy brown bananas after however many days it took to get to America or Europe from my boat.
Yeah. Thankfully, the 19th century brought steamships, railroads, and refrigeration, so the luxury of bananas became more accessible.
In 1870, a guy named Captain Lorenzo Baker shipped the first bananas from Jamaica to Philly, kicking off the banana empire. Philadelphia bananas.
That has a nice ring to it. Baker made waves.
In 1876, he took a banana tree to the World's Fair and it was a hit. unfortunately it was overshadowed by something called the telephone, but still he created enough buzz to set up the first commercial banana farm in the U.S.
in Florida. This led to the creation of the Boston Fruit Company, which in 1899 became the United Fruit Company, which is now Chiquita.
I'm just going to let it go that the Boston Fruit Company was based in Florida. But OK, so Chiquita came from a bunch of East Coast bananas.
Yeah. And the history is complicated.
So this guy Baker and two other banana barons. Wow.
They controlled the banana trade under the United Fruit Company from 1899 to 1970. And trust me, this story is slippery.
Wait, so just three men monopolized the banana trade and the term banana baron makes it really hard to take these guys seriously, but I'm guessing they made hella bank. Yeah, banana bank.
Del Monte and Dole, those fruit companies were around, but they focused on canned foods and pineapples. No one messed with the United Fruit Company and their bananas.
How did UFC, can we call them UFC or is that going to get confusing with the fighting league? This UFC is way more crazy than a cage match. In 1871, as Baker's Bananas were making waves in Philly, this guy named Minor Cooper Keith.
Okay, does not sound like a real name at all, but continue. Minor Cooper Keith, he left Brooklyn for Costa Rica because his uncle.
Oh, tell me his name was Major Cooper Keith. I'm not sure.
I'll have to check on that.

But anyway, he was also involved in the railroad industry, and he brought Minor and his brothers to help build a railroad through the raw jungle.

They had no experience, just thought, let's build a railroad through the Costa Rican wilderness.

Nothing says great idea like wandering cluelessly into the jungle and being like, let's just transform this landscape. So how did that go? Great.
I mean, back then, Central America had virtually no infrastructure. Building a railroad through the mountains, rainforests and volcanoes of the jungle to the Caribbean coast was a monumental task.
scorchingching heat, torrential rain, Costa Rica threw every disaster at them, and it was a nightmare. Yeah, I've been to Costa Rica in the modern age, and that untouched jungle is crazy.
It must have been wild. Yeah, I mean, it was brutal for these guys.
There were falling trees, mosquitoes, tropical diseases. Like, think Oregon Trail levels of dysentery.
Ah, dysentery. Yes, the classic monochrome video game killer.
I can almost see my half-dead caravan fording the river and these weird shades of green and black. But what does that have to do with bananas? So by 1874, Miner's uncle, his brothers, and about 5,000 workers were dead from the harsh conditions.
Don't laugh, Jordan. Miner was left alone to run the show, but was out of money and had to figure out how to feed his remaining workers.
So what does the guy do?

Oh, he went bananas. Yes.
Okay.

And folks, yeah, we plan to overuse this joke throughout the rest of the show.

You can count on that.

How can we not?

But yeah, exactly. The light bulb went off.

Bananas. They were growing wild all around.

So he planted a bunch along the railroad route to feed his workers and maybe sell some, too. It's actually not a bad idea.
Certainly a better idea than trying to build a railroad through the jungle in the first place. Right.
It was a fruitful venture. By 1890, forget about passengers.
His trains were exclusively used for banana transport. Exporting bananas was way more lucrative than any passenger fare.
Yeah, right now I can only transport one banana at a time. Yeah, I guess you can't sell your passengers to the highest bidder at the port.
You could no longer do that in 1890 anyway. Minor was raking it in.
And of course, as any good colonizing businessman does, he wanted more than just money. He wanted power and prestige.
So he married the daughter of a former Costa Rican president in exchange for negotiating his father-in-law's debt with English banks. He was a big deal banana baron, all respectable and whatnot.
And everyone just forgot about those 5,000 dead workers. Casualty of progress, I guess.
So, I don't know, just hearing that, it really does sound like the president sold his daughter in order for this dude to pay his debt. But we don't have any details, and that's going to be a hell of a tangent.
But that's really what that sounds like. Okay, fine.
If you can just forget I owe you a few million dollars, you can have my daughter. That's what that sounds like.
Maybe that was par for the course back then. Anyway, 5,000 dead workers is a bushel of bodies, but again, also probably par for the course back then in a big construction project like this railroad through the jungle.
Yeah, sure. And meanwhile, the banana business stateside was booming.
The United Fruit Company monopolized the banana trade. They built infrastructure and became incredibly powerful.
Capitalism, baby. Corner the market, control the infrastructure, rake in the profits.
We even still to this day say own the rails. And it's obviously a railroad metaphor or hat tip to the railroad itself.
Absolutely. And these three guys who ran the UFC, they controlled everything.
Miner owned the railroads in Central America. Preston had a steamship fleet and Baker had plantations across the West Indies and Southeast U.S.
So they made trade agreements with companies in Colombia and what is now Panama and took the banana business from zero profits in 1884 to a $10 million industry in 1906. That would be $300 million today.
Wow. Let me get this straight.
These banana tycoons turned a casual fruit snack into a money printer in record time. Yes.
And they didn't just grow bananas. They made bananas cool.
They lobbied doctors to tell moms to give their babies bananas. They put out cookbooks with banana recipes.
They spread banana fever across America.

The demand skyrocketed, and that's when the banana boys needed more land.

Banana boys.

So they weren't just rich.

They were marketing geniuses, which is cool.

Who knew bananas had PR campaigns?

So weird.

Oh, definitely.

And they were smart.

But here's the kicker.

They needed endless land because they were growing bananas like clones to speed up production.

Clones? What do you mean?

So genetically, bananas are identical clones, which means no seeds, which makes them highly susceptible to disease. So if disease hit one tree, it wiped out the whole crop.

And it was cheaper for the UFC to just plow more jungle and plant new banana trees than protect what they'd already planted. This led to the development of the disease-resistant Cavendish, the same variety we eat today, but also the cause of the destruction of a lot of tropical forest.
Bananas, saving us from scurvy but killing the planet at the same time. I guess it probably is easier to just burn a section of rainforest and plant stuff.
They're still doing that down there. Still.
Yeah. And the UFC then they were crafty to keep local governments happy.
They'd offered to build infrastructure in places that had none in exchange for land rights and exclusive trade agreements. The governments rationalized this by saying locals benefited from the infrastructure, but really UFC needed the infrastructure to run their operations.
So they're agreeing to build roads for the people that just also happen to be great for moving truckloads of bananas to their trains or whatever. Yeah, I mean, was this dishonest or just good business? Yeah, can you have one without the other? The line's blurry when profit is involved.
Of course, you can do both, but it sounds like this was one thing painted over as the other. Yeah, and the banana business was powerful, like I said.
The UFC built Central America's telegraph communications network. They built a railroad that stretched from Mexico to Guatemala to El Salvador, controlled ports all over the Caribbean, and even took over the postal service in Guatemala.
Locals there called the UFC company El Pulpo, which means the octopus, because they had their slimy yellow tentacles in everything. But they were creating jobs.
Sure, but the conditions were downright criminal. Like workers lived in filthy dorms on the banana plantations.
They paid their workers and company coupons that could only be spent at UFC stores.

No actual currency was paid and they couldn't do anything about it because the banana guys were everywhere. That is insane.
Sounds like a scam, frankly, not a business. I think that was the norm at the time.
Let me just stress the working conditions were horrific. Bananas grow in hot, humid weather, including monsoon season, and workers wade through rain and mud daily.
So banana bunches are really heavy. Like, we're talking carrying up to 100 pounds for 14 hours a day with no pay.
Jeez. So they're essentially slaves then.
The conditions were so bad that the life expectancy for men in Central America started to drop. And not just for plantation workers, but for the entire male population, all because of bananas.
And how long did this go on? In 1918, banana workers tried to strike, but the UFC just ignored their demands for years until all this banana drama boiled over 10 years later in Colombia in what came to be known as the Banana Massacre. The Banana Massacre sounds like a fruit salad my kids would make.
So what happened? This is going to be dark and I'm going to regret that joke, aren't I? Yeah, definitely a brown spot in history. The UFC set up one of its plantations in Magdalena, Colombia, which is a hot tourist spot along the Caribbean coast today.
But by 1928, the tension and abuse, it was just too much. From wage theft to housing, and to top it off, UFC bosses were forcing workers' wives and daughters into sex work to secure banana jobs for their husbands.
Oh, that is dark. It sounds like everybody had a banana job.
Anyway, forced into sex work. Wow.
The UFC were banana pimps. That is gross.
That is gross. Despicable.
It was twisted. And since UFC owned everything, workers couldn't just pack up and find another job.
So they organized again. And on October 6th, 1928, Colombian banana workers handed the UFC a list with nine demands.
What were their demands? Fair wages paid in real money, not company coupons, was at the top. Good idea.
The other demands were about basic sanitary conditions like clean water and decent housing. Pretty reasonable.
But demands also cited Colombia's constitution and called out the UFC for acting like the government. The UFC didn't like that, and they refused to negotiate.
So in a classic corporate move, they said, hey, you're subcontractors, not employees, nothing to discuss. Oh, yeah, the original gig workers.
That's messed up. Exactly.
And to make things worse, the Colombian government passed new laws, making it even harder for workers to protest. So when they finally went on strike on November 11th, 1928, the situation escalated quickly.
The strike grew into the largest in Colombia's history. The government panicked, arrested hundreds, and called in the military to silence the strikers.
Ooh, that does not bode well.

Yeah, it turns out the Colombian military was on UFC's payroll.

So they sent 700 troops to confront 30,000 striking workers in the so-called banana zone. And get this, according to the U.S.
State Department,

there was talk of sending U.S. warships to back them up all over bananas.

Wow. Bananas over human rights.
That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

It got ugly. The workers, they sabotaged the railways, crippled the banana trade.

They became a revolutionary threat, which scared the living daylights out of the authorities. So on December 5th, they told the protesters there'd be negotiations.
Thousands of workers gathered, thinking it was for peace talks. But the banana cops got nervous, and a Colombian general declared a state of siege.
The military surrounded the unarmed protesting workers, and with machine guns pointed, they gave the crowd one minute, 60 seconds to disperse, then opened fire. Oh, wow.
This is like some Game of Thrones type of scene, right? Oh, everyone just gather in one place because we want to talk to you and then murder everyone. Well, did people actually die? I assume they did if they were being shot at.
Oh, yeah. But the death toll depends on who you ask.
The Colombian government said 47 people died, but every other account puts the death toll at around 3000. I think it was really brutal.
And to send a message, the military left nine bodies in the workers' village, one for each of their demands. Just pause for a second and think about how much shooting you have to do to kill 3000 people.
There's no way that happened in like a 90 second panic shooting. That's no way.
They sat there and shot people for probably hours. That's really great.
Wow. And they left a body in the village.
That's so psychopathic. It's poetic with the body in the place, but that is so psycho.
This is some drug cartel type stuff. Yeah.
Some historians argue that the political instability in Colombia today and the whole drug trafficking nightmare can be traced back to UFC's colonizing grip on the banana trade. And as for the UFC's founder, our friend, Miner Cooper Keith, he died a few months after the massacre, but that didn't stop UFC.
So I would like to introduce you to our next banana character, Sam Zemery, also known as Sam the Banana Man, or the guy who took UFC's corruption to places even darker. You know who doesn't murder their own workers by the thousands? The amazing sponsors that support this show.
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Now back to Skeptical Sunday. This is never ending banana drama, but okay, wait, this guy was so into bananas.
He was known as the banana man. He sounds like a really crappy movie villain, like whatever, like knockoff Batman comic has the banana Man.
Yeah, definitely. We should write the script for sure.
This guy was born in Russia in 1877, but he was raised in Alabama. And Sam was just obsessed with banana boats in his local harbor as a kid.
And when he grew up, he saw a gold mine in what's called the Ripes, which are the damaged bananas that are tossed aside. He figured that 15% of each banana shipment were ripes.
So he bought them cheap, sold them to local merchants, and by the age of 21 had over $100,000 or that would be like $3 million today. Wow.
So we're talking about a teenage brown banana baron here. Yeah.
In 1903, Sam the Banana Man signed a contract with UFC to spread ripes across South and Central America. In 1905, he launched his own company in Honduras called Coyamel, and just controlled the infrastructure there.

So it sounds like he learned from the industry standard. It's weird.
It's like banana colonialism. It is.
And when the Honduran government tried to limit the foreign land ownership and raise taxes, Sam wasn't having it. So in 1911, he took drastic measures and went full banana scarface.
he hired a mercenary. You'll love this name.
Lee Christmas to overthrow the democratically elected president of Honduras. What is up with the names in this episode? Nobody has a real freaking name.
Minor Cooper Keith Lee Christmas and Sam the banana man. And by the way, which sounds like a record you'd find when you're cleaning out your grandmother's attic.
So this guy was a mercenary for bananas. How did that work out? It worked out really well.
He succeeded. The Christmas guy toppled the government, put in a puppet leader, and Sam got everything he wanted.
Land, tax breaks, and power. He was running the whole country of Honduras as one big banana plantation.
So just to be clear, we're talking about a corporate coup against a democratically elected government for bananas. This is wild.
Yeah, wild. And Sam dominated banana diplomacy in Honduras and Nicaragua.
He ended his contract with UFC in 1913. And then his company and UFC, they just played dirty with each other for years.
So fast forward to after the banana massacre in 1928, Sam the Banana Man's ships were raided and found to have loads of weapons on board, which was never really explained in my research okay the u.s state department intervened to stop the banana drama and negotiated a merger that let ufc swallow up sam's company yeah swallow those bananas whole so the u.s essentially bought out ufc's competition smart move also getting the government to do it. OK, so what did Sam end up with? He got 30 million dollars, which would be 500 million today.
He got a seat on the board of directors and this made him one of the richest people in the United States. But less than a year later, the stock tanked with the Great Depression.
Sam was furious and literally stormed into a UFC board meeting, declared himself the new managing director of operations. And by 1938, he was the president of UFC.
Wait a minute. That actually worked.
Times were certainly different back then. I can't tell if this guy is a genius or completely out of his tree.
Imagine storming into a board meeting and be like, no, I run Tesla now. Sorry.
I just I demand it. I think he was a crazy genius.
But if we fast forward by 1954, UFC was fighting another battle. And this time in Guatemala, the new president there was Jacobo Arbenz, and he wanted to redistribute land not being used and land owned by foreign companies, and UFC was not having it.
They had 600,000 acres in Guatemala, which is about a quarter of the country, and they weren't using most of the land. They were just hoarding it.
The Guatemalan government offered like $1.2 million for the land, but UFC wanted $16 million. And the U.S.
Secretary of State and the CIA director, which at the time were brothers, by the way, the Dulles brothers of airport fame, I guess, they advised President Eisenhower that President Arbenz is the problem. And the secretary had ties to UFC.
The CIA director owned UFC stock. So it's a whole tangled web.
Wait, what? So the CIA gets involved in a banana dispute? Oh, yeah. They backed a coup called Operation Success.
Oh, how very original name. The goal of the Operation Success was to overthrow Arbenz.
Sam the Banana Man published a book accusing Arbenz's land reform plan of being a communist plot. And in 1954, if you just whispered the word communism, people would lose their minds.
So it was a branding win. Just another play in the banana chess game, I suppose.
And by June of 1954, UFC-backed forces, think about this, a banana company's forces invaded Guatemala using UFC boats and American planes, calling it a liberation war against communism. And thousands of Arbenz's supporters were rounded up, and it took just 12 days for the president to flee the country.
It was another banana coup in record time. And just like that, Guatemala was in chaos that lasted decades.
But it was a success for the UFC. I guess it worked well in Honduras and Guatemala for the UFC, at least.
I want to pause for a second again and appreciate that a private company armed up and went after a country. Can you imagine if Tesla assembled some special forces commandos like retired military guys, whatever, and took over an island caribbean or whatever this is just on another level of crazy all right so where does the banana caper take us next well in a bit of deja vu enter another adored charismatic leader named fidel castro so funny twist castro's dad worked for ufc but fidel wasn't a fan of fan of UFC's stranglehold on the land.
And in 1959, he took back 35,000 acres and the UFC was like, hell no, and called their CIA buddies, the same Dulles brothers from the Guatemalan invasion. So who knew fruit companies were so connected to the federal government? I guess all you need is a ton of money.
I know. UFC said, hey, let's get rid of Fidel.
So yada, yada, yada. That's how we get to the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 14th, 1961.
OK, I know we're oversimplifying this, but the Bay of Pigs invasion was at least partly about bananas. Yes.
The CIA totally invaded Cuba and UFC's banana boats were the ones transporting soldiers and arms. And a hundred ships known as the Great White Fleet that were regularly used for transporting bananas and tourists started ferrying troops, weapons and ammunition to overthrow Castro.
But the Bay of Pigs invasion was a massive historical failure. So I guess this is where things go wrong for banana companies.
Correct. And Fidel caught up the Soviets for backup, and boom, we're in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Wow, slow down. Okay, UFC's banana empire nearly brought about nuclear war.
And all of this is rooted in freaking bananas. It intense people are eating this many bananas is it worth the trouble we're overestimating just how important bananas are to my daily life the fact that we all went up in nuclear holocaust nearly as a result it's so crazy and ufc and all these dirty dealings it left them pretty vulnerable after.
But they still had a lot of power in Central America into the 1970s. The ripple effects from these coups, it's still haunting the region today.
I can't believe that bananas, they've literally shaped geopolitics. I had no idea.
I feel bad about having sunscreen called Banana Boat now for guilt by association. Got to to raid my medicine cabinet.
Or shopping at the store Banana Republic. That's right.
But marketing genius allowed that. It's like eating at Heart Attack Burgers.
That for sure exists. I'm going to have to Google that.
But if I'm walking into a store named after a political crisis, I want a very detailed explanation of their supply chain. It's 2025.
We can't be messing with it. What is a banana republic? Actually, what does that mean? It's a pretty offensive term for countries that are politically unstable, have a wealth gap and are run by foreign companies.
So America currently got it. The OG of this is the banana industry countries.
In fact, in the 70s, several Latin American banana republics, they formed the Union of Banana Exporting Countries, or UPEB for short, and they aim to take control of their countries back and the local banana trade. So this is OPEC, but for bananas.
So did they take over the banana trade completely? Well, they did have help from Hurricane Carmen in 1974, which wiped out a bunch of banana plantations in Latin America, mostly Honduras, and that sent UFC just spiraling. They lost $70 million, what would be $450 million today, and in the company chaos, uncovered a bribery scandal with the Honduran government.
And consequently, in 1975, the then CEO of UFC, Eli M. Black, he just jumped to his death from his 44th floor office window.
All right. Disrespectful, possibly.
But finally, someone with a real name, R.I.P. Maybe he slipped on appeal.
Yeah. Or he slipped on a lot of corruption, I think.
What's super weird is he jumped with his briefcase and it scattered documents everywhere that proved he bribed the president of Honduras for lower export taxes on bananas. This became known as banana gate.
Of course. Wow.
So when something is bananas, it's literally referring to all the turmoil and craziness that bananas have caused. I thought it was just a dumb expression that we're overusing in this episode.
Both. But yeah, that's where it comes from.
So did banana gate lead to any actual change in the industry? Of course not. No.
And it's not just land battles and political chaos that haven't improved. Working conditions are still today horrible.
The big three fruit companies, Del Monte, Dole and UFC, they still squeeze every penny from plantation workers. So it's not just the UFC that's problematic.

Yeah, there are other fruit companies.

So Del Monte Foods and Dole, they both have rich histories, but just not in bananas.

Del Monte formed in 1886 as a premium coffee brand, expanded into canned peaches and Hawaiian

pineapples, eventually rebranding as the Del Monte Corporation in 1967.

And they have ongoing human rights violations facing them today. Meanwhile, Dole began in 1899 with a Hawaiian pineapple plantation and they revolutionized production.
But Dole faces a lot of public health challenges today, including E. coli outbreaks in 2005, 2006.
Sounds like some poopy pineapples. Both companies remain major players in the fruit and vegetable industries, but we'd have to do an episode on pineapples for those tales.
Yeah, the banana industry is such a bully. I really had no idea.
And there's other banana massacre type stories in the Philippines, Mexico, all over Latin America, where workers face intimidation from the military because of their banana union activities. Like there's human rights abuses that are rampant in the banana industry.
The profits for these companies are not reflected in the workers' wages or benefits, but they are paid in actual currency now. I suppose that's a plus.
Anything with labor has human rights issues. Chocolate, coffee, basically, if there's a skeptical Sunday about it and it's a food or something that you eat, it's because there's slaves involved.
So yeah, I guess I should not be surprised that there's a high human cost to my breakfast banana. Yeah.
The fruit that keeps on giving, I guess. That's right.
But when the skeletons finally started spilling out to the public, UFC figured a fresh logo would make people forget about all the coups and massacres and paramilitary ties. So in 1990, they rebranded Chiquita Brands International.
Because nothing says forget all of our atrocities like a new label on the same rotten fruit, especially one that's a dancing banana lady, if memory serves. Chiquita translates literally to mean little girl or little lady.
So they changed their name to Little Lady Banana. Cute for marketing, I guess.
But wait, am I crazy? Chiquita was around before the 90s. I remember seeing it as a kid, even a little kid watching Sesame Street or something like that.
Right. Miss Chiquita was UFC's mascot for sure.
But the company itself was the United Fruit Company until 1990. Miss Chiquita was created back in the 1940s to softened UFC's reputation, but that branding didn't age well.
UFC Chiquita banana ads were all about the exotic, and they objectified Latin American women in ways that screamed sexism and colonialism. The original logo was a sexy female banana that it really painted women as passive and consumable.
Okay. It's like they thought, what if we made a fruit sexy? We also have to make it sexist, but sex sells, right? So here we are.
Right. But the character's first introduction was weird.
In 1946, UFC put out a racist animated short called Chiquita Banana and the Cannibals. I have seen that one.
We'll link it in the show notes. It is racist as hell.
That's about all. Yeah, it's like a cartoonish stereotype of an African man shown cooking an Englishman over a fire.
And then this Chiquita banana lady interrupts singing, if you'd like to be refined and civilized, then your eating habits really ought to be revised. And she suggests a recipe for banana scallops as an alternative to cannibalism.
Yeah. And people are going, oh, I don't really get it.
When you watch this, you'll get it. Again, we'll link to it in the show notes.
It's a minute or so long. Just the cartoon image of the cannibal is pretty horrible by today's standards.
Incredibly, when I went to the Chiquita Company website, they nostalgically have an image from this early ad with text celebrating the short. Oh, God, that's tone deaf marketing.
That's kind of like if Volkswagen was like, remember when we used to make people in concentration camps build these cars, that same level of craftsmanship is still running through our veins over here. It's like, I thought we were not talking about that anymore, guys.
So the UFC uses this tropical fantasy to sell bananas while just burying the fact that they were corrupt mass murderers. And did this work? Yeah, like the cookbooks and baby food, it was all about distracting from the horror show behind the scenes.
But the 90s name change to Chiquita did not deter the company from continuing to pull strings in Colombia. And journalists unpeeled the facts of Chiquita and her ties to paramilitary groups in Colombia.
So bananas in Colombia have a bit of a toxic relationship from the sound of it. Oh, yeah.
And Chiquita likes inexpensive land. But to operate safely, they started paying the Autodefensis Unidas to Colombia, or the AUC, which in English means the United Self-Defenders of Colombia, and they were a far-right paramilitary drug trafficking group that came to power in the 1980s.
Not only in bed with extremists, in 1998, investigations in the U.S. and Colombia uncovered Chiquita bribing Colombian officials for use of their port while funneling millions to several paramilitary groups.
The AUC were designated as terrorists, and there was just no way Chiquita didn't know that. In Banana Land, though, this is just business as usual from the sound of it.
Chiquita's payments helped these gangs maintain control over the land and suppress union activity. The AUC's banana division of the group funded by Chiquita was responsible for numerous human rights violations and murders.
Over 100,000 people were displaced by the violence in Colombia's Yoruba region between 1995 and 2006, all thanks to Chiquita's dealings. Rebranding won't cover up literal murders, I suppose.
Okay, so these investigations, did they lead to stopping anything? I'm afraid to ask. Well, in 2003, Chiquita testified to the U.S.
Department of Justice that, yeah, they knew the AUC was designated a terrorist organization, but they were being extorted by the group. And in 2004, Chiquita sold its Colombian operations.
In 2007, they paid a $25 million fine to the Department of Justice, but none of this money went to victims and no executives went to jail. Meanwhile, Colombia charged 10 Chiquita executives for funding the AUC.
And the company also faces multiple lawsuits for supporting terrorism, war crimes, wrongful deaths. But it's like Chiquita has been slipping out of justice for over a century.
Right. And you said charged them for crimes.
So I'm guessing they're just like, yeah, I guess I won't go to Columbia. I'll just stay in my house and Nantucket and retire.
And it's like, OK, as long as you don't go down there, you're fine. So let me recap.
We've got a billion dollar banana empire backed by violence slash murder rebranding with a cartoon mascot to hide a century of abuse. And they just skate by with some fines that go to the U.S.
government and not the people who got pushed off their land so that they could grow bananas. Exactly.
Chiquita paid fines here and there. But in 2019, 11 years after the U.S.
plea deal, the Colombian trial against Chiquita finally began. And that's still ongoing.
Oh, wow. But just this past June of 2024, after 17 years of litigation, a jury in Florida gave the first set of victims and their families justice with Earthrights International reporting, quote, a jury has found banana giant Chiquita Brands liable for financing the AUC, a brutal paramilitary death squad in the name of the banana trade.
But no one was sentenced to jail. Chiquita had to pay eight victims' families a total of $38 million.
Jeez, that is a slap on the wrist for a massive corporation like this. Yeah, and these court cases don't even address other problems of the banana trade, like missing and murdered union leaders, child labor, which is out of control in Nicaragua, and inhumane treatment

of women.

Like, the banana game's vicious.

Also, we can pay 69 cents a pound at the store.

I mean, it's one banana, Michael.

What could it cost?

Ten dollars?

You've never actually set foot in a supermarket, have you?

I don't have time for this.

You know who won't force your wife and daughter into a banana job? The amazing sponsors that make this show possible. We'll be right back.
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Hey, don't bring me into this. I just like

eating bananas. I don't want them to come from child slavery.
Right. They do.
Child labor is

rampant across Latin America and the Caribbean, and global trade impacts women farmers disproportionately. Women make up the majority of banana farmers today, and on many plantations, they're just trapped in poverty, unable to change anything because of corporate control.
So the whole banana industry, it's built on abuse.

So workers are making peanuts while big banana rakes in billions. Nothing has changed even today.
Exactly. Workers get a fraction of the retail price while companies dodge unionization and lower wages with short term contracts.
So unfair trading practices mean supermarkets pay low prices, which forces fruit companies to pay even lower wages. And working in the banana trade is so bad.
There's a traditional Jamaican work song about how bad it is that we all probably know that Deo Banana Boat song that was made famous by Harry Belafonte. Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch.
Daylight come and be one more. Yeah, that's dark, eh? I mean, an eight foot bunch would be really heavy.
And that guy singing, he wants the tally man to count his bananas because he's just so tired from working on this banana plantation all day. Listen to the lyrics.
Yeah, at least he works the night shift. Yeah.
I mean, the point is where there are bananas being cultivated, there are suffering workers, not to mention a ravaged environment. The banana industry uses more agrochemicals than any other sector besides cotton.
Workers, both children and adults, are just regularly exposed to hazardous chemicals. Hey, have a banana and ignore the blood on the peel.
We covered it in toxic chemicals. So what are they using on these? Plantation owners spend more on pesticides than they do on paying their workers.
And ironically, the environmental degradation alone is threatening the entire banana industry. It's like this dark underbelly of global trade, and the environment has paid dearly for the love of bananas through deforestation, pesticides, and monoculture.
And monoculture is, what is that? Monoculture. It's like the ultimate soul-sucking farming method.
You just grow the same exact crop year after year, and it strips the soil, killing biodiversity and basically leaving the land trashed, dry, cracked. It's like ecological destruction at its finest.
And on a huge plot of land, only one crop is grown and nothing else can survive. And the thing with banana monoculture is it's like the banana equivalent of having no immune system.
So like we said earlier, this means that one disease, one little fungal pathogen can wilt the Cavendish out of existence. And guess what? There is a fungus and it is wiping them out.
It was only a matter of time. OK, so they're at risk of extinction.
Is that how this works? And I'm over here worried about how quickly they turn brown. I'm looking at these bananas now.
I swear they're browner than they were when we started the show. Probably.
Don't be too upset, though. The extinction thing is a good headline, but it is a bit dramatic.
Bananas will not disappear. We bred the Cavendish and we'll just breed another one more resistant to disease.
Why don't they just breed more varieties now? Money. Okay.
The reality is it's expensive to introduce other banana varieties. The entire global banana infrastructure is designed around the Cavendish.
Everything from how they're harvested to how they ripen during transport. And so replacing it would just be a logistical nightmare.
And that's the real problem. I've seen those tiny bananas.
I guess you'd have to refit all the cutting machines and the storing machines and the sorting machines if you switch to something like that. Yeah.
It's a relief, though, that we can breed a new variety. But what is the extinction fungus that's killing the Cavendish? Is that something interesting to dive into? Yeah, well, there's a very long chemical name for it, but we can just call it TR4.
And it started hitting bananas in Asia in the 90s and has attacked the banana industry, but it's slowly spreading across the globe. The whole banana industry has been bad for the environment, bad for the people growing

them, and now bad for the fruit itself. The whole thing's absurd.
We're killing bananas and their farmers and all we got to show for it is this tiny window where they're perfectly yellow. What a world, man.
Yeah. I mean, bananas, they're grown and cultivated in order to maximize profits and not to be good bananas.

Yeah.

But whatever replaces the Cavendish,

the average consumer most likely won't even notice the difference. And no matter the variety, there will also be no difference in the vast quantities of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and synthetic fertilizers required to maintain a banana monoculture.

These chemicals are usually applied by aerial application or crop dusting.

Love a good crop dust. That's how I met my wife.
Go on.

Yeah. It's estimated that only 15% of the agrochemicals actually land on the crop.

The other 85 lands on workers, their homes, and other food.

And if you're a worker who's probably lacking proper safety equipment, PPE, no shower is going to help you get that stuff off you. Correct.
And because other countries' regulations are different, one of the agrochemicals commonly used in banana cultivation is dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, which has been banned in the U.S. since 1979, but it's still widely used in Latin America.
Numerous lawsuits have been brought against banana giants by workers claiming it has suffered serious health effects. Yikes, that's awful for the workers.
And it can't be good for the earth either. I know some of these things, they try to make them safe or whatever.
I just never quite buy it. For sure.
Yeah, you shouldn't. The agrochemicals used in banana cultivation, they damage the rainforests that border the plantations.
In fact, about 10 years ago, there was a study of spectacle caimans, which are like little crocodiles. Yeah.
And they live near banana plantations in Costa Rica. They found traces of pesticides in their blood, including DDT.
And that hasn't been used in the region for years. Yeah.
DDT. I feel like we were talking about that in middle school and then it was like, oh, it's not a thing anymore.
So don't worry. But DDT is a persistent pollutant.
So it lingers in places that it hasn't been used for decades. And it was really popular in the banana industry before.
And that and other chemicals, they get into our water. Of course they do.
Yeah, that's the main thing. And we probably water the bananas with water contaminated by other crops.
Yeah. Nasty.
Yeah. And bananas have a big thirst for water, so they account for a huge amount of water use and contamination.
Since they require a constant level of moisture, like neither too much or too little, banana fields have channels for irrigation and drainage, which sounds fancy until you realize it's just an elaborate way to cause serious soil erosion. As a result, agrochemicals and silt are delivered into adjacent waterways.
And in the Caribbean, where plantations are located along the coasts, this kind of runoff has caused considerable damage to estuaries and coral reefs. Yeah, bad bananas.

Yeah, and coral reefs. Yeah, bad bananas.
Yeah, and plant waste, just as bad. Really? The total volume of plant waste, including stalks and stems produced in banana harvesting, is estimated to be about the same as the volume of fruit that actually gets shipped.
Oh, sure. Often disposed of in nearby streams as it decomposes, that stuff depletes the water and that threatens fish and microorganisms.
Plus, up to a third of bananas are deemed unfit for sale, mostly for aesthetic reasons, looking unappetizing like those brown ones in your kitchen. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, that's a lot of wasted fruit. I know I'm going to regret asking this.
What about buying organic? Is there a magical banana plantation free of all these banana horrors and pesticides and abuses? I don't even know what it means to be an organic banana. What an existential question.
Organic bananas may mean workers that are not exposed to horrific chemicals, but they don't typically improve wages or other working conditions for those working on the plantations. And what's the consumer paying for? Really just peace of mind.
The chances no chemicals blowing onto wherever your banana grows is minimal. sure plus i don't know if you've ever done an episode on this, but the chemicals are labeled organic.
So is your banana. So I basically pay more for fancier chemicals.
Jesus. Is there any positivity from buying either fair trade bananas or is that a feel good term too? Yeah.
Fair trade, not as straightforward as it sounds. Fair trade works on certifications and some certifications treat workers' rights like optional perks.
Congratulations, you're a banana worker, but sorry, you don't get any benefits. And unfortunately, some prominent certification systems consider workers' rights to be voluntary elements by the company, not just basic standards that need to be upheld.
Fair trade's like a badge for trying. And it's a bummer, I know, but fair trade's really just, it's a marketing strategy.
So what's the solution? Just buy from small farmer-owned cooperatives or something like that? How do you find that? I mean, you can. It's a really hard find, and that's just how it was set up.
Baker, Preston, Sam the Banana Man, they weren't doing environmental impact studies, right? They were just making banana bucks. And as far as money, it's a testament to the history that it's equated with making money.
There's money in the banana stand. Yeah, so much money in bananas that it's actually in crypto today.
Like, just when you thought this couldn't get crazier, there is banana coin. And it's a cryptocurrency pegged to the export price of bananas because, of course, that's what we need.
Seriously, you don't have banana coins? Loser. I guess if you sold them to buy Trump coins, then maybe you've made some money.
I don't know how that works. I wish I was smarter about that stuff, I guess.
Every banana coin represents just over two pounds of bananas grown on an ever-expanding plantation in Laos. I hate that for crypto.
I hate it for bananas and I hate it for Laos. Wow.
I know. I mean, it's not all that, though.
We love bananas, and bananas have made their way to beauty regimens. There's banana-based face masks that have become popular in recent years.
Additionally, using bananas on acne-prone skin can be beneficial because of anti-inflammatory properties that can soothe blemishes and irritation. So we're just constantly learning new things about our little fruity friends.
I don't know about a banana facial. Okay, I'm done.
But what are the recommendations for eating bananas that I can feel good about? So I found the Food Empowerment Project strives to inform people about where their food comes from so we can make the most ethical choices possible.

But for many, bananas are just a reasonably priced fruit

that contains beneficial nutrients.

But buying conventional bananas

contributes to both environmental and human rights abuses.

You just can't get around it.

But I still want to eat bananas. I know.
We all do. And there are brands to look for, like Equal Exchange, Coleman, Earth University.
There's a few others, but it turns into a banana scavenger hunt. I wish we could ask the grocer, hey, could you stock ethical bananas? I'm trying to save the world here, one fruit at a time.
It's a tough life for bananas. They got to battle fungal pathogens, military coups.
They're used in condom demonstrations in middle schools around the world, as far as I know. And they got to compete with avocados and eggplants for social media clout.
We've been making all these puns, but it is worth discussing bananas in pop culture. They are our most comical food.
And when we first chopped the idea of this episode, remember, like our texts were just a pun battle. Bananas have been used in pop culture forever.
Anything phallic, really, though? Eggplant emoji, anyone? Come on. Why would you use that if not for what you use it for? Yeah.
The bananas, they are a symbol of cultural identity in Latin American

countries. For example, there's a Puerto Rican artist, Francisco Aller, and in his paintings,

bananas represent national pride. And of course, there's the phallic shape, the visual element

that makes them a good topic in film, TV, art. Andy Warhol frequently used the banana shape as a sex object.
And it's funny when someone slips, if you're four. It's very funny.
They are used in comedy, right? And memes. There's the dancing banana icon.
That's a big widespread meme. There was a French dancer and singer who was pretty popular, Josephine Baker.
And she wore a banana skirt costume in 1927. She did a review which became a symbol of the jazz age and the roaring 20s.
And recently, Beyonce, Rihanna, they've paid homage to Baker's banana skirt, taking back the racist tones of what the skirt meant. And it's endless.
There's the imagery in the Jungle Book, Woody Allen movie Bananas, the Banana Boat and Jaws, their use in Minions and Family Guy, not to mention how many common phrases we use the banana in. Yeah, bananas are indeed bananas, to prove your point.
But hey, at least they taste good, and they make us laugh while we battle the ethics of the whole thing.. Yes.
Every time we put a banana in that morning smoothie, though, we're blending this history of coups and scandals and human rights violations with a little bit of that entertainment. I suppose so.
And there you have it, folks. Who knew bananas were living such a complicated life? They got more going on than I do.
So next time you peel your morning banana, remember, there's a whole lot more than just potassium in there. Thank you all for listening.
Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday. Show notes at jordanharbinger.com as well on the website.
Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Jessica on her sub stack between the lines.
We'll link to that in the show notes as well. I also have a new sub stack called Where the Shadows Linger, but it's all fiction.
I have a short story collection coming out. We can link to both.
Look at the show notes. This show is created in association with Podcast One.
My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.
Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Remember, we rise by lifting others.
Share the show with those you love, and if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.
Join us as Adam Gamal, a Muslim Arab American and former Egyptian refugee, recounts his rise to become a key operative of one of the U.S.'s most secretive military units in this two-part podcast series. In part one, Adam delves into the high-stakes world of counterterrorism and covert operations, revealing the personal and ethical complexities of fighting terrorism from within the shadows.
I came to the U.S. to give me the right to dream.
In Egypt, you don't have that option. It's not cliche, I'm not trying to recruit people to join the army, but I was like, here is a key, actually, to be as American as anybody can argue with you.
And it was joining the military. You end up there by pure determination, by having grit and by being a bit lucky.
So we were basically getting our tasks from Secretary of Defense level. Joining Special Operation Command in charge of three main missions.
Counter-narcotic, counter-terrorism, and hostage rescue. I believe myself, if my dad did not push me towards getting the right education, then maybe I would've went in the wrong direction.
So education gonna help people prosper, they're gonna help people actually critically analyze the information they are receiving. So when somebody's bullshitting them about, hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you're going to hell.
If you have an educated person, you're going to look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any fucking sense. And then I believe to educating women is crucial because they are raising us.
A lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things. So if we have a population of educated women in the Middle Eastern in any of these countries, I think these countries will prosper.

And it will be harder to convince these guys to become terrorists.

Business is war and business is good.

When we give people the proper education, we all live a better life.

Tune in to uncover his unique journey and critical insights only he can provide