Chapter 5
Held in Philadelphia in 1876 to celebrate America’s founding a century before, it was officially titled the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, but better and less clunkily known as the Centennial International Exhibition. Its 30,000 jam-packed exhibits ranging over the city’s Fairmount Park gave Americans their first foodache, with nine diners, including The Great American Restaurant, the New England Farmer’s Home of 100 Years Ago, Trois Frères Provencaux, and the Restaurant of the South, where the “Centennial Exposition Guide” informed readers hungry for a cultural experience that they could sup to “A band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’ who will sing their quaint melodies. . . .” With less Jim Crow on his menu, Charles Elmer Hires quenched fairgoers’ thirst with free glasses of his novel root beer, marketing it via 25-cent packages of the 16 dried roots, herbs, and bark that went into his beverage, along with 3-ounce bottles of condensed extract that promised to sanitize the blood and thus result in rubicund cheeks glowing with health. A year later Hines would begin shipping root beer in kegs and producing a special fountain dispenser to pour out its frothy goodness.
Of all these palatable wonders, the greatest of them, the one with the uttermost culinary impact may have been the exotic yellow berry that grows on a tree-like perennial herb, 15 to 30 feet high, that was introduced to exposition visitors: the banana.
Until that day, bananas were still thought of as a delicacy, selling for 10 cents apiece. Usually wrapped in tinfoil, the long tapered berry was properly eaten with a knife and fork. Creamy in texture and mild in taste it may have been, but it was the organic sheath—which marketers cannily later called a “sanitary wrapper”— that helped the banana hit critical mass with the fair’s 10 million visitors.
Food poisoning was as widespread then as it was poorly understood. This was an era when Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which speculated that some maladies were caused by microorganisms, was barely in its adolescence. This was an age when Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis’s preposterous notion that hand washing would reduce infant mortality was ridiculed by the medical establishment. And this was a time when the Pure Food Movement’s grassroots coalition that sought to remove contaminants from the food-manufacturing process was just starting to coalesce—and whose exhibit would one day scandalize the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
Additionally, the first federal law requiring inspection of meat products, and the Pure Food and Drug Act, were fourteen and thirty years in the future. Bananas offered the perfect option for impatient consumers who couldn’t wait decades to eat healthily, with a peel that was as sure a prophylactic against disease as a Trojan condom.
Bananas trace their pedigree back to New Guinea around 8000 BCE and, the more theological speculate, the Garden of Eden before that. There, some believe, it was more likely the phallic-shaped herb, and not an ordinary apple, that tempted Eve to forgo modesty for knowledge.
Courtesy of the Washington Banana Museum
Whatever its divine connections, the banana spread over the centuries, crossing a tropical axis through the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, the African continent, and Central America. Buddhist literature takes note of the banana; Alexander the Great encountered the herb; later, Islamic merchants spread word of the self-sealed delicacy.
Much later, in 1870, bananas and America became acquainted when ship captain Lorenzo Dow Baker procured 160 bunches in Jamaica and resold them in Jersey City, New Jersey. But the blond berry’s true debut in the United States, its commercial coming-out party, was the nation’s centennial birthday party in 1876.
Exhibiting bananas at the expo resulted in the kind of impact we associate today with televising a commercial during the Super Bowl. In 1871, five years before the expo, the value of banana exports into the United States floated around $250,000; 30 years later that figure had expanded wildly to $6.4 million. In 1876, the year of the expo, the United States’ first banana plantation was established in Florida.
Bananas became so prevalent in so short a time that their peels littered sidewalks with the ubiquity of locusts in Exodus. Vaudeville comedians Billy Watson and Cal Stewart worked the slipping shtick and other banana-peel-related humor into their routines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Harold Lloyd brought the slip-and-slide to worldwide audiences with The Flirt; later, Buster Keaton perfected it in The High Sign. Skidding on cast-off peels wasn’t just a trope of popular entertainment or a myth of urban origin, either: A Boy Scout Handbook from the early twentieth century advised readers to pick up discarded peels. More recently, Mythbusters deemed the hazard genuine as well.
Courtesy of the Washington Banana Museum
Despite their innate perishability, bananas’ popularity spread. In the decade following 1900, their consumption nearly tripled—from about 15 million bunches to more than 40 million. Bananas ingratiated themselves in American diets even more when David Evans Strickler, an apprentice pharmacist at Tassel Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, brought forth the banana split in 1904.
From bananas came dictators, the way oil produced malevolent sheikhs a few decades later. O. Henry coined the term “Banana Republic” in his 1904 short-story collection Cabbages and Kings, an early foreshadowing of Central American countries whose despots treated their citizens with the tenderness Herod did the slumbering children of Bethlehem.
Few today remember that the U.S. government invaded Honduras to support its oligarchy’s desire to grow bananas unimpeded by human rights concerns. Fewer still know the United States helped crush banana workers’ strikes in Panama, Colombia, and Guatemala.
Today Americans eat bananas an average of 46 times per year, more than oranges, melons, and grapes combined. Underscoring that, the amount of bananas consumed per person grew from 7 pounds in 1970 to 10.4 pounds in 2010.
But bananas’ popularity is what may spell their doom. For decades, since the late 1800s, the most popular banana was the variety known as Gros Michel, or Big Mike. Around 1910, Panama disease—aka Race 1, a wilt caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum—emerged, killing off Big Mike by 1965. Replacing him was the less tasty but seemingly more disease-resistant Cavendish, but now that too is under attack by Tropical Race 4, which affects the plant’s vascular system, preventing it from absorbing water. Even more threatening is black Sigatoka, a fungal disease. Spreading in the last fifty years from Southeast Asia and the South Pacific to Africa, Honduras, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, the Caribbean basin, and southern Florida, the infection can easily wipe out 50 percent of a banana crop.
With no world’s fair introducing or popularizing a staple like the banana—not even Expo 2015, whose central theme, after all, was “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”—there may be little to replace the food that has meant both food security and income generation to millions.