Last time I was in Hawaii the pineapple was higher than in California. They only grow in Hawaii, right, at least for the American market? Lobsters in Maine were more expensive than in Kansas, as were California abalone. Is this a free market? Or is the Mafia somehow in on it?
As they always say, “somebody had to do it.”
TThis one pops up from time to time – the scare, that is.
I worked handling produce for several years and I never saw a big scary spider in any fruit container. Maybe by the time it gets to Massachusetts, a tropical spider isn’t going to be hanging around anymore.
It’s one of those things that CAN happen in a temperate zone, but not bloody likely. You’re more likely to get run over by a delivery van in the parking lot.
:smack:
Also bananas go through ethelyne gassing processes. I don’t know if big scary spiders are partial to those.
Container ships are amazingly cost effective to the point where transport of bulk goods is basically free (not really but you are looking at cents for something like a bunch of bananas).
How do supermarkets make money on them? They generally don’t. I used to work in the supermarket industry and bananas are just one of those things you are expected to have on hand. If you include labor, they generally lose money on them but they hope to break even.
I freely admit that I don’t know how the entire supply chain exists except that bananas are typically grown in places like Central America where average household income is only a few hundred dollars a month at the most and bananas grow like crazy. All it takes is a few cents a bunch to support an average worker.
There is also the clandestine part of the operation. This is one of the few true conspiracy theories. The CIA supported banana operations in Central America through the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Banana) to overthrow governments in Central and South America from the 1930’s onward. It was very real. My undergraduate university even had whole buildings dedicated from that cause. If you don’t believe me, Google CIA United Fruit Company. I have no idea if the whole industry is still corrupt today but it may be. Maybe the whole industry is inadvertently subsidized and they don’t care much about the bananas at all.
The most likely answer that bananas are very easy to grow, cheap to ship and no one expects to make money on them.
My family used to own (and I used to work at) a company that made banana ripening rooms. One of the Chiquita executives I talked to said they made most of their money shipping goods back to Central America. Chiquita owns the ships. Sorry, no cite, just a conversation I had years ago.
The volume of banana consumption in the US is enormous. In Cincinnati we built about half of the ripening rooms used by the produce distributors. That was 38 rooms. Each room holds one semi load of bananas (40,000 lbs). Each room could ripen a load in 5 days. And that was in one small city.
I have mine delivered by Great Eagle; a loss of 999 out of a 1000 due to snacking is a small price to pay.
Does it grip it by the husk?
I am no food faddist, but after seeing a video of what happens in these plantations, I would never buy one that wasn’t Fair Trade.
As far as ripening on the tree is concerned, I grew up in Sierra Leone, where bananas grow, but not commercially. We had a load of them as a border round our garden. There were two kinds; one, the little red ones that were absolutely delicious, but had a short season and didn’t keep well. The others were much bigger (plantains?) and were usually cooked rather than eaten raw. The natives let them go black before they would eat them.
The poster who said they are a herb was right, and they are really a berry too.
If you want to try a cooked one, do it on the barbeque: Slice the banana along one side and insert a chocolate flake. Wrap it in foil and while the party eat their steaks etc, leave the foil-wrapped bananas on the hot embers. They are done when slightly squishy and you just open them up and eat with a spoon. Squirty cream is very popular on them.
Just thought I would throw in that bananas are Walmart’s top selling item. They sold 1.6 billion pounds in 2016. I assume that is ranked by weight, not value, although the articles don’t state it.
Dennis
Zombie bananas are almost always overripe, brown, and missing a portion of their peel.
Yes, the Cavendish replaced the Gros Michel. In the 1950s, Panama disease devastated a large number of Gros Michel plantations so they switched to Cavendish. The Cavendish in turn is now being threatened by a new strain of Panama disease and will probably cease to be a major crop in a few years. Hopefully it will be replaced by something else but some people are saying banana growers are not taking the threat seriously enough.
Shipping costs of full containers is much less than you would imagine. You can book a 40K lbs container from Los Angeles to Costa Rica for about $2K off a web page on the internet. I suspect banana producers are paying significantly less. I wouldn’t be surprised if shipping costs were in the neighborhood of 7 or 8 cents a pound delivered to the market’s distribution center.
Are you saying Harry Chapin lied to me about the weight of a truckload of bananas?
Because there’s always money in the banana stand.
Those get pulled from sale in the produce department, and moved to the in-store bakery – where they have a sale on banana bread the next day.
I was a longshoreman during the 1990s and worked a few shifts as a forklift driver unloading banana boats at the port of LA/LB. They arrive on refrigerated ships on pallets, not in containers. We forked them directly into a HUGH refrigerated warehouse. It went very fast, and even though we were well paid, the labor costs were something like fractions of a cent a pound.
Not to mention the giant spiders the diameter of an extra-large anchovie pizza with ricin dripping fangs lurking within your banana bunch, ready to pounce on your face and bite you when you reach for a banana to slice into your bowl of Kellogg’s Cornflakes tomorrow morning.
…don’t worry about it! There’s only a 50/50 chance of that happening to you. Sleep tight.
The simple truth is that shipping stuff, in the literal sense of carrying it on a ship across the oceans, is darn cheap. That’s because of the economies of scale involved: Modern cargo vessels can carry upteen thousands of tons of payload. Tat drives down the per-pound price of the cargo carried. In many cases, hauling goods across the ocean for thousands of miles is cheaper, per pound of cargo, than trucking it just a few hundred miles on land from the port to its inland destination. A truck can carry one of two containers, a cargo ship thousands of them. As we’ve said here.
There are lots of other bananas apart from the ubiquitous Cavendish. These are a few.
I very much doubt that’s still the case. The entire shipping industry is designed around containers (which may, of course, contain palletized loads). Here, for instance, is a page from Chiquita’s website with a photo of one of their container ships used for transporting bananas.