The Way We Eat Now. Би Уилсон

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      For the rest of their banana needs, Icelanders do exactly the same as people in all northern and western countries: they buy Cavendish bananas shipped in abundance from sunnier countries by a large multinational corporation. Most of the bananas in Icelandic supermarkets – and there are plenty of them – have the blue Chiquita label depicting a glamorous woman wearing a fruit-decorated Carmen Miranda hat (‘Miss Chiquita’). An American firm based in North Carolina, Chiquita is one of the largest global fruit brands, operating in seventy countries, selling bananas produced in South and Central America, with a large concentration coming from Guatemala and Mexico. So far from being a banana outlier, Iceland is in fact entirely typical in the way that it consumes bananas.

      Banana bread is currently one of the most-eaten cakes in Reykjavik and modern Icelanders are also enthusiastic consumers of raw bananas eaten out of the hand to gain a quick boost of energy. By 2000, according to FAO data, Iceland imported 12.46 kilos of bananas per head, nearly four times as many as Russia.³⁶

      Bananas are a quintessential modern food in that they are overwhelmingly grown in tropical regions but eaten in temperate regions. Bananas are grown in developing countries for the pleasure and nutrition of developed nations. Our dependence on bananas reflects the astonishing fact that it has become more common to eat foods grown from foreign crops than from your own country.

      Those yellow fruits, once rare and specific to certain places, are now an ordinary presence in kitchens across the world, a foreign taste that is no longer foreign. To our grandparents, unless they lived in the tropics, the banana was exotic, a huge and unusual treat. Now, there’s nothing unusual or exotic about bananas, which tend to be the cheapest fruit in the supermarket.

      Bananas have become an everyday food in Italy and Oman, in Germany and India. Wherever in the world you eat a banana, it is likely to be the same bland Cavendish variety which dominates the world export trade, even though they never taste very good. Cavendish account for 47 per cent of all bananas grown (and close to 100 per cent of all bananas eaten in China and the UK).

      For a long time I was puzzled by bananas. Sometimes British people of the wartime generation would speak of how desperately they missed bananas during the war and how they yearned to eat these special fruits again when the war was over. I couldn’t fathom this because the Cavendish banana is nothing to crave. But the bananas of the wartime generation were different. Before the Cavendish, the dominant banana was the Gros Michel, which was said to taste much better. It was a rare example of an old fruit that was sweeter than modern produce; and not just sweeter, but creamier in texture, with a deep, winey and complex flavour. If you’ve ever eaten a banana-flavoured sweet – that deep, sweetly pungent aroma – it’s apparently much closer to the Gros Michel than to the Cavendish. The problem was that the Gros Michel was wiped out by Panama disease in the 1950s.³⁷

      When casting around for a new strain of bananas that consumers would accept, the United Fruit Company, the American-owned company that controlled most of the world’s banana plantations, alighted on the Cavendish. It tasted nothing like the Gros Michel – growers at United Fruits noticed that the flavour was off and the texture was dry – but it looked the same, it transported easily and, crucially, it was resistant to Panama disease. Without having much to recommend it in terms of flavour or texture, the Cavendish became the banana to conquer the world, largely because it looked the way people expected a banana to look. (At the time of writing, the Cavendish has been hit by a new strain of Panama disease, which casts yet more doubt on the wisdom of the banana industry investing so heavily in just one strain.)³⁸

      As a fruit engineered to be seedless, every Cavendish banana you buy is an exact genetic clone of every other banana. Bananas are the monoculture of all monocultures. There are more than a hundred varieties of bananas in existence – including red-skinned ones – but you wouldn’t know it from the selection on offer in most shops, where bananas come in just one variety. Except for plantain-eaters who eat them in cooked form, you seldom hear anyone talk about the virtues of different varieties of banana because the whole point is that you expect them to taste the same: not the most delicious thing you ever ate, but cheap, filling and fairly wholesome – compared to a bar of chocolate if not to other fruit. Bananas in the supermarket are mainly marketed not on variety or flavour but on size: small ‘child-sized’ bananas, larger ones for the rest of us.