Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

by John Soluri

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.

Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Food, Environment, Latin American History, American History, Read For School

344 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Always Pouting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soluri uses Honduras' history of banana production and export to explore the usual narratives and ideals associated with the banana republic. Honduras was one of the first to start exporting bananas and the time line of events happening in the industry tend to foreshadow or exemplify what was happening in other countries that were also exporting bananas. The argument is made for a more dynamic understanding of the situation where each side changed in response to the other rather than any one part of the story being unchanging and passive. The book also covers a lot on the environmental effects of the banana trade, especially the pathogens that became much more wide spread due to the large singular growing of bananas which all happen to be very uniform in genetics because banana's don't cross pollinate they clone basically. I really liked the book, I do prefer academic books that look at the more complex dynamics underlying a situation rather than those trying to impose theoretical frame works that neglect a lot of the situational and variable events that are actually happening. I think Soluri tried to cover too much in the book and that maybe he could've left out the cultural associations of the banana because it didn't necessarily tie in back together with the environmental, cultural or political narrative. The different aspects of the banana industry and their affect on one another wasn't integrated into the book which was a missed opportunity.

[Ana Paulina Maestre Camacho · Rating 3 out of 5]

What does it mean to eat bananas?
Where do bananas eaten for breakfast in the US come from?

This book narrates the history of banana from mass production in the North Coast of Honduras to mass consumption in the US. With a historical, environmental, political and cultural approach. Even if it is not mentioned explicitely, it explain the colonial legacies then led through an “intervention by invitation” from the government of Honduras with United Fruit Company/Chiquita Brands.

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class. Wrote this yesterday evening lol…

I am currently sitting in a GO Bus Terminal because I missed my bus by one minute, and now have to wait an hour for the next one. Public transit and urban planning is something else out here. The wifi is also not working in this enormous building, so I now have the unique opportunity to write about this book lol.

Let’s see… this was supposed to be an important work in commodity history. I am interested in commodity history. I myself will be focusing on lumber/timber processed in sawmills for my own research, but possibly also on agricultural commodities processed in grist mills. In part, this book felt like some of the stuff I read as an international development student, but with a lot more fun cultural history folded into it.

Soluri is focused on the interconnections between sites of mass production (banana plantations) and mass consumption (American cities). Noting the way the “banana lands” of Latin America have surfaced in the literary works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, Soluri draws on a unique range of sources including popular culture artefacts (advertisements, musical lyrics, recipes) and literary works of fiction (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Ramon Amaya Amador’s Prision Verde) to colour a narrative that one might expect to be more banal and economic.

I was particularly interested in Chapter 5 that focused on Amaya Amador, a Honduran writer and Communist Party organizer. The way Soluri uses Honduran communist literary fiction to highlight the real environmental violence that banana plantation workers faced in their daily lives made for some fairly interesting reading. It’s like Benedict Anderson meets… well I don’t know commodity historians… maybe Raj Patel. Anyway, you are made to see the ways U.S. imperialism is intimately connected with with the slow violence of toxin exposure that ‘poison applicators’ (Amaya Amador’s term) face when treating banana trees with pesticides.

It is not simply a political story though, because it has to do with the way flora was circulated throughout empire and the complex agroecological interactions that occur when that happens. The way a plant native to Southeast Asia is brought to Latin America, planted in vast plantation rows, and subject to the elusive agency of pathogen after pathogen, arriving to breach all attempts at recreating a small fertile replication of the banana plant’s home back in Southeast Asia, many times over. All this unfolds as fungicides sprayed on the plants find their way onto the bodies of workers, into their lungs, and into the water they wash themselves with. As Amaya Amador’s character Don Braulio passes away in the field, his comrade laments: “The plantation ate him up! He died with the spray nozzle in hand, serving foreign masters.”

Meanwhile in the US, you have the banana (once a delicacy reserved for rich aristocrats) becoming a symbol of mass consumption and sexual humour. Dried fibers of banana peels provoke rumours that they produce hallucinogenic effects; you get songs like “Mellow Yellow” and Warhol’s cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico.

The book closes with a cursory run of other similar commodities, the most interesting to me being coffee. There was a fascinating comment on how the Haitian Revolution shuttered coffee exports from San Domingue leading to a rise in Brazilian coffee exports early in the 19th century. As the 19th century Brazilian senator Silveira Martins said in reference to coffee's dependence on racialized slave labour: "Brazil is coffee and coffee is the Negro.” The theologian Leonardo Boff mentioned four pillars of an unequal society as identified by the Brazilian Marxist historian Caio Prado Junior, and one of these pillars was production concentrated on foreign markets (particularly the production of coffee).

Soluri also notes how the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange, standardized coffee and banned Robusta, a far more leaf-rust-resistant variety, leading to far higher risks for coffee growers in Latin America. There is still a very persistent stigma against Robusta among so-called third-wave coffee roasters, and it’s pretty fucked up how capitalism can turn the whims of rich countries into a living hell for the rest of the world who work in dangerous monocultural plantations, struggling ceaselessly with environmental violence in the form of toxic chemicals to keep coffee rust at bay.

My bus is still not here, and I’m sort of hungry. I’m thinking about how I don’t really like eating bananas by themselves; I basically only eat them with cereal now. Ok, I’m going to go line up for the bus now lol.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned so much about bananas! He uses a very impressive range of archival sources combined with worker interviews for a thorough history of the banana export economy on the north coast of Honduras in relation to US consumer interests. Maybe a little flattering to the banana multinationals for my preference, but very readable.

[Cindia Arango · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor John Soluri's book Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States published in English by the University of Texas Press, Austin in 2009 analyzes the relations of production, consumption, and socio-environmental transformations in the North Coast of Honduras. It is a book that explores the relationships between environmental history, the history of science and technology, and the history of political economy. Soluri explores central themes of broad historical debate such as modernity, forms of production, and consumption of a product; in this case some fruit: bananas. The author addresses the problem of modernity as the mechanism used by the United States to insert itself into the relations of economic control in Central America that Soluri also focuses on as an idea that "domestication" of nature seemed to be the giant flag of modernity. We will see through the book that this idea is a more complex debate. When referring to the forms of production, Soluri analyzes the chain of efforts of scientific knowledge and material technological advances that were located at the "service" of banana production. In this sense, technology and science are fundamental in the ways of transforming space, also of "controlling" ecology and accumulating in a massive form an element of nature. Consequently, Soluri analyzes consumption as one of the last links in this great production chain and puts an in-depth debate on environmental history like this: what are the environmental implications of the products we consume every day and why is this question relevant to history today? It is not a book about production lines, but it is also not a book about a call to the morals of readers.

The book Banana Cultures masterfully explores how transformations are generated in nature and how these lead to socio-environmental conflicts. Soluri makes intersections between "pure" states of nature such as land, water, diseases and insects, chemicals, or even people. This intersection allows Soluri's work to be considered an environmental history of hybrids and interconnections. This work explores interdisciplinary elements from the natural sciences and social sciences to study the particularities of the recent history of a society. In general terms, I highlight from this book the way in which during each chapter the transnational perspective can be observed without losing sight of an approach to microhistory. That is, the history of banana production is constantly connected to other consumer products such as coffee in South America, sugar in the Caribbean, and citrus fruits in the southern United States. In that sense, the book reverses the orders that are normally studied in a production chain because it is not continuous and progressive but crosses, that is, it crosses borders. In fact, Soluri manages to reevaluate the protagonist's view of countries that invest money in places as benefactors. On the contrary, Soluri highlights the local population and integrates it as part of the discourse of social history and its links with environmental history.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well-researched book about banana cultivation in Honduras in the 20th century. It integrates environmental and social history and does a very good job discussing the daily work of a banana plantation, and how mass marketing affects mass consumption. I think more theory and analysis would tie it together - Soluri briefly discusses labor movements but not really how they arise from working conditions. Labor history and environmental history are in a bit of an uneasy relationship right now, and I think stories like this one could tie them together, instead of just falling back on Richard White's truism "workers experience the environment through work," which, yes. They do. But there's more that needs to be discussed.

[Isabelle K · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was drier than a rotisserie chicken that's been sitting uncovered in the fridge for over a week. I had to read this for a class and honestly can say I took away nothing of substance. It's a fun conversation topic though so I'll give it that.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting depiction of how another country can control one's government. Also shows how inhumane people can be when money and fame are on the line. Overall, very interesting and eye-opening.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

the extermination camp sort of beauty: people should go hungry in honduras, poor people should get less to eat in the first world, all because a few white people need to feel ”i am saving the earth”.

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some parts so interesting some parts so boring...

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this for class 🫡

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In general, crafting effective interdisciplinary scholarship is difficult in any field and environmental history is no exception. While the discipline has a history of claiming to be an interdisciplinary field that combines history with science (most particularly ecological sciences), environmental history shares the basic difficulty of interdisciplinary scholarship: how can a trained historian accumulate, interpret, and use effectively scientific data to bolster a historical argument and vice versa (how can a trained scientist employ historical research to bolster a scientific argument). Given this challenge, the author’s primary discipline shines through with interdisciplinary information tacked on somewhat awkwardly. In John Soluri’s book BANANA CULTURES, however, the author offers an example of scholarship where the merits of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental history shine through rather convincingly. Although the account could not be mistaken for a primarily scientific study, it does discuss science in historical, cultural, and technological terms to chronicle the development of the modern banana industry. The cultural evidence and primary sources used to advance his arguments—photographs, maps and charts, fictional and scientific texts, etc.—are not merely interdisciplinary add-ons, but in fact, they are crucial and effective primary sources that offer a much clearer view of the historical, scientific, and environmental processes being discussed than had they been omitted.�

In John Soluri’s Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, & Environmental Change in Honduras & the United States, Soluri examines “the mass production [primarily in Honduras] and mass consumption of bananas [primarily in the U.S.]” in order to chronicle the social, cultural, and environmental changes that occurred in these two countries as a result of banana cultivation. In his fourth chapter “Sigatoka, Science, and Control,” Soluri explains the scientific nature of Sigatoka, or leaf spot disease, as well as the scientific responses made by the plantation owners to combat the disease and protect their banana plantations. Rather than devote this entire chapter to scientific discussions of the biological causes and preventions associated with the disease, it is in this chapter that he first introduces literature as a means of discussing the process of banana cultivation. While it might seem odd to appeal to fictional literature to inform a chapter specifically addressing science, Soluri does so in such a way that it is not only refreshing but also convincing. His insertion and contextualizing of descriptions found in Ramón Amaya’s 1950 novel Prisón verde works to animate his scientific discussion of Sigatoka and Bordeaux spraying. Serving as a “metaphor for a system of export agriculture that subjugated working people and undermined Honduran sovereignty,” the book lends a vibrant cultural layer to a process that has hitherto been explained in technical terms that only gave an abstracted sense of its impact on human life. Literature here makes the important discussion of science more human and thus even more important. This chapter is not a token appeal to interdisciplinary scholarship, but rather, it represents a well-executed example of its merits.

Environmental history, particularly when imperialism is involved, requires interdisciplinary studies and methods to effectively chronicle its stories and interpret its meaning. Environmental history involves so many variables of technical knowledge and cultural variables that a singular approach would miss out on the complexities of the issues involved and the factors in play. John Soluri and his investigation of banana cultures in Honduras and the United States represents a model interdisciplinary study of environmental history. Not only does it communicate the changing nature of scientific responses and their environmental consequences to resource production and extraction, but it also addresses cultural and social dimensions of change as nineteenth century colonialism gave way to a new form of imperialism in which private businesses took the place of direct government colonization.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soluri writes an integral ethnography on the cultivation of bananas in Honduras starting in the early 19th century. The work contributes to the documented history of Honduras by using changes in the environment and in cash crop production as a time scale. Soluri examines not only the effects of cultivation on the land, but also the contract farmers and employees of the monotlith companies United Fruit and Standard Fruit and their subsidiaries. Furthermore, he analyzes how these companies changed their sales tactics to the US over time and how the banana's role in pop culture shaped Americans' perceptions of Hondurans.

The author takes a multidisciplinary approach to documenting and analyzing banana cultivation. He is meticulous in examining company records: through these, he can determine how companies responded when disease struck banana cultivars. He also makes reference to experiments conducted by scientists who were employed directly by the fruit companies. Soluri teases out the truths of Ramón Amaya Amador's fictitious account of an impoverished banana grower, "Prisión Verde." Other references to plant biology shape his discussion of monocultures and various banana cultivars, yet the discussion is accessible to readers not founded in biology. In terms of primary research, Soluri provides snippets from interviews of former banana workers who recall the harsh but (relatively) prosperous work on the plantations.

Although not a central part of his thesis, the work could be used in the nature vs. culture discourse. For example, market forces changed the desired amount of banana production but the environment was not always willing to respond. Conversely, the heavy use of agrochemicals in banana production has been able to conquer many of the pests and diseases that once decimated harvest levels. Soluri explains the chemicals' social and environmental impacts in Chapter 4. The final chapter compares cultivation practices of bananas to other major cash crops of the region, namely sugar and coffee.

Recommended for students in anthropology, environmental anthropology, development, crop science, plant biology, toxicology, sociology, environmental science.

Alex Martin

[Tara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like books about food- the history of food, the production of food. This book had interesting information about making the banana popular food in the US and changes in production to create demand. The narrative did not generate excitement about the banana and it did not describe a dramatic struggle for workers rights. The narrative was not able to successfully able to weave together the threads of popular culture in the US and worker resistance in Honduras and how the banana connects the two.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 Stars.
This book is not linear which made it difficult to follow along in the time scale. It is also really heavy on facts, dates, and numbers that feel pointless, and it is pretty boring as a result. I think the topic is really interesting, and the interviews with the banana plantation workers are really interesting, but the rest of the book is a huge miss for me.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting historical monograph on the history of America’s food commodity of the banana. Unfortunately this too is a history of economic strongholding and exploitation of people, land, and resources.

[Erik Loomis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arguably the best book we have connecting environmental change in Latin America and the US. I can't recommend this one highly enough to anyone interested in the connections between the two regions.

[K Stark · Rating 2 out of 5]

For such an interesting topic... relatively dry read.
And nope, didn't finish it.

[Lashonda Slaughter Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at how the commodity driven market impacts the areas where they are grown.

[Jack Blitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The banana is truly a global phenomenon and John Soluri conveys what is a complex topic into an easy to read and engaging history of the world’s most popular fruit.