As we first learned in Limon, Latin America banana culture
involves a laundry list of cooking methods that vary by region usually
according to culinary tradition. The variety of applied uses of bananas and
plantains remains surprising because of the plain banana and banana pudding
that I am used, not to mention that I had only eaten plantains in a middle
school Spanish class before coming to Costa Rica. While many uses exist, my own
host family uses the fruit more or less “normally” as far as I am concerned.
For plantains, my abuela chops and fries them, mixing butter in for
flavor. She sometimes prepares green
plantains, baked or fried, mixed with hoja
de carne as a starch topping. Bananas are always served sliced for
breakfast. They are eaten among the family blended with sugar and milk with
rice pudding, but they are “never” used when they are green. I classify the
uses in my home as very “white”. My host family has previously expressed
irreverence for indigenas and people
with African descent. The place of the banana and plantain in their home
curiously parallels that mild dislike for the peoples that use the fruits in
many other ways.
Interestingly, when I leave early for Colegio Metodista on
Mondays and Wednesdays, my abuela puts a banana unpeeled in the refrigerator
next to other fruits sliced on a plate. She told me that she couldn’t slice it
up because it would go bad even in the refrigerator. I didn’t understand
because I could easily grab a banana from the fruit stand in the middle of our
kitchen. She doesn’t usually serve the bananas chilled and sliced. It is as if
touching the fruit is off limits entirely, unless I’m going to eat it.
My abuelo asserted the following: bananas are the second
most important export product for Costa Rica, and coffee is the first. Bananas
are only grown on the Atlantic coast and that’s why there are many black people
in Limon. Companies build houses for workers and many people harvest and
cultivate bananas for a living, but the work is not like it once was. Costa
Rica gets a lot of money from bananeras and would not be as good as it is without
them.
Latin American nations commonly depend on agriculture, and
the types of crops produced can often dictate economic and environmental
political policies, as well as influence the social structure of a country or
region. Minor Keith’s commission from the Costa Rican government to construct a
transnational railroad paralleled the planting bananas alongside the tracks. This
infrastructure deal ignited a benefit pattern for the nation from export
commodities. In the 1870s, Keith opened the first banana plantation in Costa
Rica and began exporting to U.S. markets. In order to increase production and
export, the Costa Rican government began to offer generous land concessions and
incentives to attract foreign investors, a practice continuing today is
so-called Free Trade Zone. The United Fruit Company was born out of a merger
and had a monopoly over the banana industry until the 1950s in Costa Rica.
While largely influenced by and dependent on banana
cultivation, the country has faced harmful consequences from the banana trade
that seem to be ignored by my host family. The campesino image of subsistence agriculture in the mid-nineteenth
century that is weaved through national mythology began to change drastically
with coffee, and later with bananas. It is as if my host family thinks of
bananas as being grown in that context! A clear void between the facts and what
they perceive is alarming. If they could only read Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed
the World, they might find the human and environmental destruction examined
therein somewhat frightening. Or if they were introduced to Frundt’s brief
mentioning of “A Costa Rican Model”, they might realize how their own country
deserves some recognition in the ongoing effort to stabilize the banana trade
and support those producing the fruit, not to mention the dangers associated
with following very different routes as have been taken by companies like
United Fruit in the past.
I found many mediums for bananas in a small tienda and a supermarket, both in
Sabanilla. Here are a series of photos showing those mediums:
Notably, bananas were located at the center of the fruit
section, varying in quality (size) and riper than they might be sold in the
States. They were strategically placed next to the equally valuable fruit,
pineapple. The fruit was also an additive or product-image accompaniment in
some products. After asking an attendant in the supermarket where the baby food
was located, she asked “de bananos?” Of
course, I said yes, and she led me to the section. In the small tienda, it was interesting to see that
the bananas were located immediately below the counter and were broken off into
separate pieces of fruit, not in bunches. The fruit is definitely the most
prominent in my house and seems to be the centerpiece of most fruit sections I
have seen in Costa Rica. While usages vary, not to mention interpretations of
what the fruit has meant for Costa Rica, bananas are an indispensible staple
across the country.
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