- [Man] The American nation can not,
must now, and will not, from empty establishment,
form another communist government.
- This is called a Cavendish banana.
It's the most common banana on earth.
It's probably the one that
you have in your kitchen right now.
It's definitely the one you see in the grocery store.
This banana was created in a fancy looking house in England.
Yes, created and yes, in England.
Kind of weird, bananas aren't from England.
They're originally from Asia and there are thousands
of different kinds of bananas.
So how did this banana,
the Cavendish that was created in England
become the banana that you eat today?
Well, the answer to that is not so simple.
You have to understand the story of bananas, which yes,
is something we're diving into today.
It's a story filled with predatory corporations
and geopolitics and American imperialism and disease,
and really some amazing marketing.
It explains how corporations can grow so big
that they begin to act like governments, like dictators.
And it explains why this banana, the Cavendish,
the one you know and love, might not exist soon.
- [Woman] The world's most popular banana
may be on the verge of extinction.
Oh, and while I was diving deep into this,
I discovered that there's a better tasting banana out there.
One that isn't supposed to exist anymore,
but I got my hands on some and yes, they're better.
So buckle up.
This is the F'd up history of bananas.
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So bananas are from Southeast Asia, but like 400 years ago,
Europeans were taking over the world
and the Portuguese brought bananas over to the Americas.
A few hundred years later,
an American sailor was in Jamaica
and he found this funny looking exotic yellow fruit
and money started flashing in his eyes.
He started selling bananas to Americans
who quickly loved this new fruit.
Bananas were trending.
People were talking about it.
So then fast forward to nearly the end of the 1800s.
And you have the World's Fair,
where all the people show up
and show off their new technology.
At the fair you've got this guy,
Alexander Graham bell,
who's showing up with his cute little new invention
that's about to change the world.
But another crowd favorite at the expo was the banana.
Yes, bananas were equally as impressive
as the telephone at the World's Fair.
The banana business started booming in the United States.
Much of these bananas flowing in from New York City.
The port there was dubbed Banana Docks for a while
because of so much fruit import.
So now you have all these Americans eating the sweet,
creamy, delicious fruit,
and throwing the slippery peels onto the street.
It got so bad that the police commissioner at the time,
oh God, I can't get away from this guy.
Teddy Roosevelt once again.
I swear I get into any story,
I like to start to research it.
And it's like, yeah.
And then there's an American imperialism.
And Teddy Roosevelt shows up.
Anyway, so Teddy Roosevelt,
the police commissioner starts putting a fine on people for
throwing their banana peels on the sidewalk.
Like this isn't just like a silly, fake joke.
It's like, this is a real thing.
People slipped on banana peels.
- Patrick, banana peel!
- What did you say? (screams)
- And you could go to jail for it. I mean, look at this.
There's this New York Times article
documenting Teddy Roosevelt,
the police commissioner,
speaking to a room of police captains, explaining quote,
the bad habits of banana skins and dwelling
particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air
and bring them down with terrific force
on the hard pavement.
This was a real issue.
Banana Docks, Teddy Roosevelt, slippery banana peels,
silly newspaper articles from the late 1800s.
This isn't the story here. We're just getting started.
This is banana's innocent phase.
It's about to heat up.
Let's see how bananas turned from this to this.
(upbeat music)
The banana business people in the US realized
it was time to ramp up to meet all of this new demand.
But instead of just importing more bananas from say
Jamaica or other countries in the Caribbean,
the banana companies realized
that they needed to control the supply chain.
Let me explain what I mean by second,
by looking at this banana.
Bananas are fragile. They're soft.
They spoil in like a week,
but this one's like moments away from spoiling.
Look at those spots.
To get this thing from somewhere close to the equator
all the way to New York City and then into someone's market
and then into somebody's home all without it being crushed
and without it spoiling is a fragile,
quick, expensive process.
And the only way to do it profitably is to do a lot of it.
A lot of bananas.
(upbeat music)
And the only way to do a lot of bananas
is to control the supply chain.
So it's like 1900 at this point,
there's a banana gold rush happening.
And there's a bunch of companies trying to figure out
how to control the supply chain.
And then they decided to sort of merge together and become
this one super company called the United Fruit Company.
And their plan for combining was to
control everything, control the supply chain.
They turned their attention completely to Central America
where they know bananas could grow abundantly,
and where, oh, look at this.
The US is thinking about making a little canal that cuts
through this little narrow strip of land.
So the United Fruit Company is like,
that's kind of a nice perk for the region.
If anything goes wrong,
the US could have our backs.
Foreshadowing.
Am I foreshadowing? I'm foreshadowing.
So yeah, United Fruit Company is like,
this region, central America ,
looks like a great neighborhood to control the supply chain.
They wanted to control the people who worked
on the farm by owning their basic survival needs.
They wanted to control the houses they lived in
and the stores they shopped in and what they could buy.
They wanted to control the transportation by building
railways so that they could quickly ship
their product onto ports.
They wanted to control the boats and the waterways so that
they could get all of these bananas from Central America
to the US before they spoiled.
They started with Guatemala,
pouring tons of investment into
controlling every inch of their supply chain.
Soon, they were the largest company in Guatemala.
They owned a fifth of the farmable land in the country.
They owned all of the railways and
all of the radio stations and radio infrastructure.
And by 1901,
the government of Guatemala actually hired the
United Fruit Company to manage the country's postal service.
What?
United Fruit was starting to look a lot like a government.
And the result was a lot of happy banana eating Americans.
So they kept going.
They kept expanding their operations across Central America.
So now with all of this beautiful infrastructure
and trains and land,
the next strategy for making bananas even more profitable
was, you guessed it, paying the workers next to nothing.
And paying them not with real money.
(upbeat music)
A lot of the times United Fruit
paid their workers in vouchers.
These vouchers could only be used
in designated United Fruit commissaries.
So they're not actually making real money here.
So wait, now the United fruit Company has its own currency?
Oh, and they also had like a private Navy,
93 boats called the Great White Fleet.
Then eventually they started using these boats
to transport people on cruises.
These boats were even used during World War II.
United Fruit started to look like a literal government.
They had their hands in everything so much so
that they earned their self the nickname El Pulpo,
which means the octopus in Spanish,
meaning they had their tentacles in everything
all over Central America, the land, the crops, the people,
the infrastructure, and soon enough government agencies.
Soon these countries became so dominated by
and reliant on the United Fruit Company
that they were no longer run
by the people or the governments.
They were run by American banana companies
who had all the power and leverage in the world.
This led to the nickname Banana Republic,
which is a politically unstable country whose society is
exploited for profit for one single product,
in this case bananas.
And probably not the best sort of thing to name
your clothing store after,
but just a thought, but like who made that decision?
United Fruit and other banana companies
continued to grow and control Central America.
Eventually people got tired of this.
In 1911, Honduras was like, all right, we're done,
banana companies.
We're going to take back our land.
We can take it from here. These are our plantations.
You've gone too far. Banana companies didn't like this.
So they organized a private army to help overthrow the
government so that they could put in a president
that they liked who would allow them
to keep doing exactly what they
were doing and also give them a tax break.
So yeah,
banana companies are now overthrowing governments.
Jeez.
This kept happening.
Anytime there was political dissent or the governments
of these countries started to step up and say no,
the banana companies would intervene,
and guess who had their back?
The US military, and yes,
we're back to Teddy Roosevelt.
Teddy Roosevelt.
What a guy.
Here's Teddy stomping around the
Caribbean with his big stick,
making sure that American military and business interests
are protected, in Honduras alone,
the US invaded seven times in the early 1900s,
all in the name of protecting these banana companies
and other US interests
from having to face these pesky locals
who were so audacious as to want to run their own country.
How dare they?
If you remember that at this time,
the US was starting to get really comfortable with empire
behavior and central America
was at the top of the priority list.
The banana companies knew this,
which allowed them to feel emboldened,
to just sort of do whatever they wanted in the region.
But this is sort of child's play.
It started to get a lot worse in the 1920s.
(upbeat music)
There was a situation in Colombia where a bunch of workers
for the United Fruit Company decided to stop working
and protest their working conditions.
They were asking for a few things like, I don't know,
working six days a week instead of seven,
or getting paid real money.
The United Fruit Company refuses to negotiate with them.
And instead goes to the US and says, hey, USA,
we've got these really annoying workers who are
trying to unionize and trying to get paid and stuff.
And it actually smells a lot like communism.
And the US is like, wait, what, communism?
Tell me more.
So then the US threatens to invade
with their Marines and squash this strike
if the Colombian military doesn't do something first.
Reminder that we're not talking about
some big political revolution or rebellion.
We're talking about a few workers in a banana plantation
protesting for more humane conditions.
And yet this was a priority for the US government
to put pressure on Colombia to fix the situation.
Of course, Columbia didn't want to make the US angry.
So they responded and sent in their own troops
to go put down this workers' strike.
And they were ordered to quote,
spare no ammunition.
So on December 5th, 1928,
these protesters are in the town square
in this town in Columbia.
And the Colombian army shows up and massacres them.
Men, women, and children were killed by their own military
all because an American banana company
didn't want to pay them a decent wage.
I mean, this is madness.
It is madness to think that these large geopolitical forces
were coming to bear over a banana plantation.
This event is called the Banana Massacre.
This didn't stop in 1928,
fast forward to Guatemala in the 1950s.
At this point,
the United Fruit Company, El Pulpo,
is making major profits.
They own almost 50% of the land in Guatemala tax-free.
But this president, Jacobo Arbenz,
who was democratically elected is trying to change things.
He wants to take land that United Fruit owns
but isn't using and redistribute it to poor Guatemalans.
He's sort of doing like a Robin Hood thing,
trying to like lift poor Guatemalans out of poverty.
But of course, United Fruit didn't like this,
but instead of engaging directly
with the Guatemalan government,
United Fruit goes to the white house
and says those magic words again, communism.
United Fruit then hired this PR magician
who happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew.
And he worked with news agencies to create a bunch
of fake stories that linked Arbenz,
the president of Guatemala to communism,
completely fake news.
And not just like using that word lightly,
like he created a fake Guatemalan newspaper,
created all these fake reports
and then distributed those fake newspapers to Congress.
He planted the seeds in their minds
that United Fruit Company were the good guys
and that Arbenz,
the democratically elected leader,
needed to go because of communism.
It totally worked.
President Eisenhower,
the president of the United States believed all of this.
And he sent in the CIA to get Arbenz out of power
to protect the banana people once again.
It's a classic CIA coup, they go find a bunch of rebels.
They give them money and they train them.
- [Radio Announcer] Rebels rose to oust
Guatemala's red infiltrated government.
- They find a leader who wants to be the next president
that's friendly to the US and eventually they start
broadcasting anti-government propaganda,
and they turn Guatemalans against their government
with all of this fake news and propaganda.
They send the Navy in to block Guatemalan waters.
They send some bombs onto Guatemala city,
and then they invade.
(dramatic music)
And then with these trained fighters,
they go take over the government,
the Guatemalan army surrenders,
and the leader of the rebels becomes
the new president friendly to the United States.
And now the banana companies are happy and they have a guy
in power that is their guy.
It's like they have a playbook on how to
mess with democracies around the world.
And they just sort of followed the playbook.
They're like, oh, we've done this before.
We're going to do it again in Iran in a little bit.
This is classic CIA coup, by the way,
this coup was sort of a death blow
to democracy in Guatemala.
It divided and destroyed the budding civil society
that has not allowed Guatemala to recover since,
all because these banana companies
wanted to control the supply chain.
These things leave scars, major scars,
major marks on a country, scars that are still felt today.
Let's switch gears for a second because all of these
banana coups and banana republics
and massacres is like horrendous.
But during all of this violence
and military invasions and human rights violations,
all of this meant that the United Fruit Company
was getting really, really good at their business.
They were sending too many bananas to the United States.
There was a ton of bananas supplied,
but demand wasn't rising fast enough.
The average American didn't totally know how to use bananas.
So the United Fruit Company
creates this amazing marketing campaign.
(upbeat music)
So now they're paying doctors to write amazing
academic journal articles about bananas.
They cut a deal with Kellogg's to market the cereal
as something that pairs with bananas,
which is something I still do today.
I cut up my bananas and I put them in my cereal
because of this campaign.
They targeted moms with small children.
They made recipe books.
They even created a guide on how to decorate with bananas.
- [TV Broadcaster] Bananas can to be served
in many different and many attractive ways.
Blended with fruits, nuts, and gelatin,
they provide high food value with nourishment.
- But their biggest success was Miss Chiquita.
♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say ♪
♪ bananas have to ripen in a certain way. ♪
♪ And when they're flecked with brown and have a golden hue ♪
♪ Bananas taste the best and are the best for you. ♪
- The American public fell in love
with this lady and bananas.
They had no idea that these bananas
that were being produced and shipped and bought with blood,
they just liked how they taste.
But isn't that the case with a lot of things
that we all consume every day.
But there's one thing that US imperialism and millions of
dollars of marketing cannot control, which is disease.
This is the part of the story that I tell you
that the bananas that were all the rage
during the 1900s are not the bananas
that you're eating today.
(upbeat music)
Part of United Fruit Company's efforts to control everything
was standardizing the genetics of the banana,
making them all exactly the same.
Monocultures is what we call that.
The problem with monocultures is that they are heaven
for a disease because you don't have to solve
the same puzzle to infect another banana.
If you infect one, you infect them all.
And that's exactly what happened.
Panama disease was a fungus that came in
and destroyed banana plantations.
The banana supply in the US shrank rapidly.
And there was even a hit song about the banana shortage.
♪ We have no bananas today ♪
The banana that they had been using,
the one that was getting really popular in the US
was called the Gros Michel, or the Big Mike banana,
but it was now completely getting ravaged by disease.
So these banana companies are freaking out.
They're like, we are done,
we've built this entire empire
and this disease is going to wipe us out.
So they started to scramble to find another banana.
It turns out there's like
a thousand types of bananas out there.
There's red ones and blue ones and teal ones.
I mean, a blue banana.
I feel like I have to eat a blue banana
at some point in my life, but here's the problem.
Us Americans, we buy our food kind of with our eyes first.
We're just like, it needs to look good.
And so these companies realized they couldn't
send a blue banana to the United States.
They needed a banana that looked similar, yellow,
sweet and seedless so that they could keep selling to
Americans who hopefully wouldn't notice the switch.
Enter our friend, the Cavendish banana
♪ God save the precious queen ♪
Like I said at the beginning,
this banana was invented by a British guy who was tinkering
with banana seeds in this amazing looking house
in Northern England.
And after years of playing around with the genetics,
the plant finally flowered and popped out this big,
beautiful yellow banana.
And so he named it after the Duke William Cavendish.
So now here's the sad part.
The Gros Michel,
the one that had caught on that was like the big hit in
America was a way better banana,
is a way better banana.
It is sweeter.
It's more durable and it's just overall a better banana
compared to the Cavendish.
In fact,
the artificial banana flavor that we have in our candies,
like Laffy Taffy comes from the original Gros Michel,
not from the Cavendish,
but the Gros Michel was getting destroyed by this disease.
And the Cavendish was luckily resistant to the disease.
So the dictator banana companies made the switch and hoped
that the people wouldn't care or notice
as long as they looked the same.
And guess what? It totally worked.
They quietly switched out the banana to the new Cavendish
and people just kept buying bananas.
I mean,
I can't believe that there is a better banana out there
that I have not tasted.
I wonder if I can get my hands on one.
(upbeat music)
The Gros Michel banana still exists.
It's just a select few people on this planet still grow it.
And I found a farm that sent me a few.
I'm going to try this thing.
Gros Michel. Let's do this
Beautiful banana. Wow.
I'm obviously primed to like this more
so I don't know if I'm really liking it more,
but it's definitely a better banana right now in my mind.
Slightly different color.
It's got this like burgundy vibe going on.
It's sweeter. I like the texture more.
I think this is a better banana.
Too bad this thing got completely wiped out by a disease.
So let's get up to speed before we finish the story off,
because the last part of it is quite interesting
and applies to our modern day.
To summarize,
came to the US, predatory companies invaded whole countries
to help the US exploit them for bananas
while using amazing marketing to keep demand up.
And because of this Panama Disease,
they had to switch to the inferior Cavendish banana.
So where do we go from here?
United fruit eventually rebranded to Chiquita.
They're still doing some pretty shady stuff
like paying millions of dollars to terrorist
death squads and getting sued by workers
who've become sterile after handling pesticides.
Banana companies will probably always do this.
Because the other thing that remains
is that bananas are still soft and
spoil quickly and grow in far away places
from where you eat them.
So the entire supply chain needs to be controlled.
And the other thing that hasn't changed is that the new
banana is genetically optimized
so that every banana is exactly the same.
So it fits perfectly into these boxes,
into these crates, onto these ships,
into these supermarkets.
But guess what? There's another disease.
The Panama disease,
the one that wiped out the Gros Michel,
it's back and it's mutated,
and it's coming for the Cavendish.
And what's tricky about these diseases is there's no way to
detect them before they arrive before it's too late.
It just quietly kills the banana trees
and makes it impossible to ever grow there again,
you have to burn the entire plantation.
This is already happening in the Philippines,
which is the second largest exporter of bananas,
the disease has devastated the land and the banana economy.
It's making its way through Asia.
But Asia is super far away and it's like,
there's a whole ocean in between.
All our bananas come from Latin America. Wrong.
In 2019,
it was detected in Colombia.
And in April of this year, just a few months ago,
the disease was found in Peru, right next to Ecuador,
which is the largest exports of bananas that come to the US.
It's coming for your bananas.
So everyone's on high alert and bananas
as we know them might be doomed.
So now we're seeing history kind of repeat itself.
We're looking at the potential collapse
of a $25 billion industry and entire economies,
which is like hundreds of thousands of jobs.
(dramatic music)
To me, the big problem here,
the thing that's repeating itself is the same problem
of United Fruit Company going in and trying to control
every angle of their production to maximize profits.
When we have companies that feel emboldened
to do whatever it takes to make the most profit,
you're going to get situations like this,
whether it is banana massacres in Columbia
or a coup in Honduras
or a monoculture that gets wiped out by disease
time and time again,
we try to engineer our way out of these problems
and we sometimes do, but at the end of the day,
nature will catch up with us.
And as long as we ignore the true cost of these economies,
the cost to people, to democracies, to ecologies,
we're never actually going to get rid of these problems.
Thanks for watching.
I'm going to eat a Cavendish now.
See you.