Unpeeling the 24¢ Banana
Understanding America's cheapest fruit through one delicious cake
It was after 1AM, or some much earlier hour that seemed recklessly late to my 6 year old self. I tiptoed down to the kitchen. Discovering that no alarm would go off for opening the refrigerator at this ungodly hour, I carefully unwrapped a softball-sized piece of tinfoil, all that remained of the chocolate banana cake that my Great Aunt Sylvia had mailed from Santa Fe to Connecticut for my father’s 40th birthday.
I stole an almost unnoticeable nibble of cake. I stopped there; anything more might have been noticed the following evening when my dad unwrapped his last piece of cake. And then he’d have to wait another 12 months for his next one, which would be simply unforgivable. This banana cake was, after all, one of my dad’s sweetest memories of his grandmother, Sophie, who had passed the recipe down to his Aunt Sylvia, who carried on the tradition of shipping a double plastic-wrapped, overnighted package of sweetness on every one of my dad’s birthdays.
I am not proud of this story of thievery. Indeed, I have spent the ensuing decades atoning for this confectionery heist by making dozens of my own chocolate banana cakes. This has been possible because, some years before Aunt Sylvia passed away, my cousin Zoey had the foresight to shadow her in the kitchen and actually write down the steps and measurements. Since then, I have worked over a stained, wrinkled printout of this recipe for every family holiday and birthday where a cake could fit in. I have yet to find an occasion where it doesn’t.
Other times, no celebratory excuse at hand, I find myself whipping up a cake simply to rescue aging bananas. My kitchen is a no-kill refuge; we are on a mission to save even the brownest, softest, most ragged bananas from waste. Especially those.
After all, a perfectly rotten banana, the sweetest for baking, is hard to find at a grocery store. You would think that for the quantity we eat (they’re the single most purchased item in the American produce section), it would be easy to find some bad apples—er, bananas—in the bunch.
To the contrary, in a recent banana cake emergency (that is, I wanted a cake but didn’t have one), I scoured all my local markets and couldn’t find a single overripe banana! Devastated, I thought about how odd it is that all the bananas in Connecticut are so perfectly, frustratingly firm and near-ripe. And while my sugar-starved brain sat with this odd fact, I went bananas trying to figure out why these consistently ripe fruits, which have inspired so many apeeling puns, are always so darn cheap. They shouldn’t be, if you think about it.
Here in Connecticut, apple orchards are everywhere; you can walk through one and pick an apple yourself if the mood strikes. But they cost around $1.16/pound. Oranges, which mostly come from Florida and California, also right here in the country, cost more than bananas do: about $1.54/pound compared to 65 cents/pound for bananas.
Bananas, on the other hand, have to be grown in warm climates thousands of miles away and then shipped here under refrigeration. Once the ships dock, the fruit sits in ripening warehouses where workers pump in ethylene gas to trigger the color change on a schedule, timed so the banana on your counter turns yellow right around the day you actually plan to eat it. Given this distant shipping and refrigeration cost, how do they end up costing less than the apples grown in-state, or the oranges grown some states south? My research has unpeeled (sorry, I just can’t help myself) three main reasons: the "Banopoly" (my term), vertical integration, and price capping. Let's take them one banana at a time:
(1) The Banopoly: A handful of companies, Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte among them, once controlled nearly two-thirds of the global banana trade, making them the undisputed top bananas of the produce aisle. Their combined grip has loosened some since the 1980s, down to roughly a third of the global market by the early 2010s, but they still set the terms for most of what ends up in an American produce aisle. How does the Banopoly keep the price down? First, it keeps out competition from other producers who might sell a better, or even just different, product. Nearly every banana sold in an American grocery store is the same variety, the Cavendish, cloned rather than grown from seed, which means the crop behaves with almost mechanical predictability: no unpredictable harvests, seasonality, or commodity futures market driving the price like for wheat or corn.
Predictability comes with a catch. A crop with zero genetic diversity has zero resistance if a disease finds its way in, and a fungal blight called Panama disease has already wiped out banana plantations in several countries. But worrying about that right now might make me stress-eat a whole banana cake, so we’ll save it for another day.
Second, a lack of competition leaves workers with almost no negotiating power, which keeps wages low: often just a few dollars a day in countries without labor protections.
Finally, acting as a coordinated bloc, the Banopoly has historically wielded enormous geopolitical power to protect its own interests. United Fruit, along with rivals like Zemurray’s own Cuyamel, helped install and depose governments across Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the early twentieth century to keep land, taxes, and labor costs favorable to the business.
The writer O. Henry coined the term “banana republic” in 1904, in a short story based on his time hiding out in Honduras, describing a fictional country whose government existed largely to serve a foreign fruit company.
Reality wasn’t far off: In Colombia in 1928, United Fruit directed the government to fire on striking banana workers, killing more than a thousand of them. Nearly a century later, the same company, by then renamed Chiquita, admitted in a 2007 guilty plea and agreed to pay a $25 million fine for having paid millions of dollars to a violent Colombian paramilitary group between 1997 and 2004. And in 2024, a federal jury held Chiquita liable for related deaths.
(2) Vertical integration: The Banopoly also owns nearly every step of the process itself, and not just the plantations. The same companies that grow the fruit also own the ships, the ripening rooms, and often the trucks that carry it to your grocery store, controlling the whole operation from root to peel. There’s no middleman marking up the price at each handoff the way there is with, say, an apple that passes through a grower, a distributor, and a wholesaler before it reaches a shelf.
(3) Price capping: Grocery stores, well aware of how popular bananas are, treat them as a loss leader, pricing them near or below cost to get you in the door. They make the margin back on everything else in your cart. In this way, grocery stores are subsidizing the American banana habit, incentivizing shoppers to buy a fruit that takes far more resources to ship and store than ones grown closer to home.
Why a Jewish banana cake?
Is the historically low cost of the banana the reason my struggling ancestors adopted it for their cake? Indeed, it turns out that embedded in Sophie’s banana cake is not just vegetable oil and sugar, but the history of my Jewish immigrants in America, and that of the banana itself. That history explains why my family’s only prized recipe, the one passed down from generation to generation from my Russian-born great-grandmother to my own daughter, is not a latke or brisket or even a babka, but rather, a chocolate banana cake. For this history—of both the banana and my family’s relation to it in cake form—come back next week, when I’ll explore the fascinating, overlapping history of the two.
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