Go Banana's

In the Sanchez-Mora family, bananas are almost exclusively used as a desert. Whenever I get flan, I can almost certainly expect it to be surrounded by bananas. Plantains are also used as a desert, when they are ripe. My tico dad went on a euphoric rant about how delicious a plantain could be if it was cooked at the perfect time. I hated to bring him down, but I went ahead and asked about the history of the banana. To my surprise, he was not exactly too down about the whole situation. In fact, the first thing that he said was that, along with coffee, the banana is enormously important for the economy. To him bananas brought trains, infrastructure for private industry, and ports. He mentioned how Nicaragua does not have a port like Limon and has to ship its big products to Costa Rica and drive them up to their country. We talked about how the workers were treated poorly, and he totally agreed, but mentioned how the unions had made tremendous changes.

I found all of this very interesting. When I asked about the importance of bananas, immediately I was met with economic importance, not humanitarian foul play. Is this because he is of a different generation, removed from the trials? Could it be that the way bananas were grown here led to more positives than negatives? In a class that we learn the damning actions of “capitalistic” money whores who give no care to the treatment of people, this was unexpected. Of course, he mentioned the bad things, and my Spanish teacher did as well (we asked her after class), but both indicated that this was not the present way. According to them bananas are important, but less important.

This importance has some carryover in how bananas are sold. In the markets there are bananas, in the supermarkets there are bananas, in the AM/PM there are bananas. The thing is they are not the highlighted product. They are there, you can buy them almost all the time and they are good, but they are rarely the item that you see held up on a banner by vendors on the side of the road. I find this to be similar to the United States. Perhaps one of the curses of having no specific growing season is that its uniqueness is lessoned. If it never is able to be special, there is no reason to make special sales unless a batch is about to go bad. Neither here in Costa Rica or the United States are bananas the primary products in markets.

Here is a display of bananas in the AM/PM: