Bananas!

Bananas are pretty ubiquitous in Costa Rica. They are eaten in shakes called batidos, fruit salads, alone as a snack, in ice cream, and there is even a special ceviche that is made with green bananas. Besides bananas themselves, banana leaves are often used in preparing other food (such as grilling fish). Below is my breakfast from today, where I received bananas in a fruit salad.

Bananas are a very important fruit to Costa Rica, according to my Tica parents. They are a very large export for the country and eaten very frequently domestically as well. My parents compared bananas to the export of coffee in Costa Rica. They even said that bananas are a more important export at this point then coffee is--an unexpected response from my perspective. We have talked a lot in class about the difference between bananas and coffee in Costa Rica, but my parents seem to be just as proud of banana exports as they are of coffee.

When we began to talk about the history of banana cultivation in Costa Rica, my parents told me a lot of what we have already discussed in class. Bananas started to grow here because companies from the United States decided to grow them here (namely the United Fruit Company, as we've come to learn in class). Banana cultivation brought workers from the Caribbean, and my parents said that it even brought los chinos here as well (whether the ticans like it or not!).

For how often bananas seem to be consumed, they are not very prominently displayed in grocery stores or markets. I know that in the market at zapote, there are often fruits displayed cut in fancy ways, or are very large and are arranged in attractive ways. However, when you get to the banana stands...the bananas are strewn about, and often are spotted with brown. This is very different from the often spotless green bananas that we find prominently displayed in bunches in supermarkets in the United States. There are also bunches of smaller bananas sold in Costa Rica whereas in the US we have that standardized, large, "perfect" banana being sold. The impression that I get from all of this banana talk is that bananas are almost begrudgingly necessary in Costa Rica. They are eaten often, produced here, but the best bananas are not kept within the country, and instead we see brown spotted bananas sitting in fruit stands and supermarkets. They are necessary to be consumed and exported, but there is some sort of hesitation or bitterness that comes along with them. The display of bananas in markets is a great communicator of this contradicting view on the fruit.