Friday, September 14, 2007

Going Bananas

[open: Raffi’s “Bananaphone”]

Is there a sillier food than the banana?  How can you not love this rude and goofy fruit, the subject of jokes and slapstick routines?  The banana is the cheapest and most popular fruit in the U.S. (Jenkins 142). We mash it for babies and elders, and it’s a potassium-rich lifesaver for many of us harried and hungry folks. 

But we often forget how recent this tropical addition is to our diets.  Mid-century Americans had to be taught by the big fruit growers how to eat and store them, as in this Chiquita jingle:

(Link)

And just as we learned how to eat them, we learned to ignore the poisonous politics of banana republics and the impact of plantations on the workers and the land.  Of course, the politics of fruit have been with us for a while.  In the mid-1970s, some 17 million Americans honored Cesar Chavez’s political boycott of grapes.  Learning from my parents to forego lunchbox grapes was my first taste of protest – and it tasted like both self-righteousness and sacrifice.

Fast forward 30 years to this summer, when I was happily munching my breakfast banana and reading about the glories of eating local foods.  Tra-la.  I believe in local foods, don’t I?  But then, whoops!  I slipped and fell, hard, on an anti-banana diatribe. Those of us in fruit-rich regions of North America, my book lectured, should not be importing tropical fruit for an obvious reason I’ve ignored: The banana is the poster-fruit for the big bad carbon footprint. The petroleum and pollution behind my sweet banana suddenly filled me with shame.

So: This is month three of my banana boycott, and I gotta say, it’s still killin’ me.  I make myself feel a little better by ruining bananas for my friends.  But you know what?  My self-righteousness and sacrifice once again tastes bitter.

Americans have entered an Eco-Friendlier-Than-Thou phase in which all of us sin and fall short of the glory of Green.  We know the mantra of using less, recycling, minimizing our planetary damage. But for every good Green choice we make – like giving up bananas or bottled water – there are hundreds of ways we’re likely being bad.  It’s exhausting; it’s demoralizing.

Happily, I can recommend a brilliant book that proposes an eco-revolution, captured in its cheeky, revisionist title, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. In a chapter titled “Why Being ‘Less Bad’ is No Good” the authors explain the dilemma of the you-can-never-good-enough eco-consumer. This book inverts the language we usually associate with environmentalism: “reduce, avoid, minimize, limit” (45).  Against this demoralizing approach, in which we assume industry must damage nature, the authors propose nature’s own abundance as a model for human production.  Their prime example is the super-abundance of a cherry tree, which creates “thousands of blossoms for fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually take root and grow” (72).  But who among us sees the profusion of cherry blossoms as wasteful?  The cherry tree produces more than it must for its own survival, but everything it creates enriches the earth.

The book describes revolutionary products – from soap to houses – that will both serve their purpose and nourish, not pollute, nature. The book itself is a beautiful example, made of resins that can be reused and re-imagined infinitely. It’s lovely to the touch and water-proof enough to dip in your bathtub.  In this vision, the future is about pleasure, not privation.

Where does this leave me and my empty banana bowl?  Well, instead of dwelling on my virtuous deprivation, I’m learning to enjoy the abundance around us. It’s harvest time! Let’s shake them apple trees, my friends.  The revolution starts now, and it is, indeed, Delicious. [sound: apple bite]

For Michiana Chronicles, this is April Lidinsky. [Steve Earle, “The Revolution Starts Now”]

Jenkins, Virginia Scott.  “Meaning of Bananas,” Bananas: An American History.  Washington, London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart.  Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on September 14, 2007
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