Banananananas

My Tica mom would be the first to say that there is no need to cook something that tastes best just the way it is. My Tica family goes through bananas faster than I have ever seen before. Whether they eat it as a snack or for breakfast with their cereal, the banana is a very common food to find in my Tica household. My Tica mom explained a type of picado or fruit salad that is made with bananas that she loves to make. She also discussed how much she loves smashing and frying plantains to make the plantain “cakes.” She explained how easy it was to use bananas and plantains at all stages of ripeness. For example, the over ripe plantains are much sweeter and perfect for desserts, but the greener ones are good to fry. This relates to the variety of plantains and bananas that I saw at Mas por Menos and a vender close by to my house. At both locations there was a large range of unripe to very ripe bananas and plantains. The vender close to my house had his car covered in plantains; the front hood was green, the trunk was yellow, and the top of the car was black. The bananas and plantains that at I saw at another “fruteria” hung their bananas from string, displaying them all over the store. Noting these three places and their display and structure, I would say bananas and plantains have a very strong popularity in Costa Rica.

Fruteria in Sabanilla

As my Tica mom had said, plantains have a wide variety of uses at each stage of ripeness. However, it seems that bananas are often bought ripe and eaten very close to the time they were bought. Sometimes it seems that my mom even buys over ripe bananas, assuming that she likes the flavor of the ripe bananas more. And I would have to agree that even though they are mushy, the ripest bananas have the most flavor. This is a totally different behavior towards bananas and the few plantains that we have in the United States. There are many who have the opinion that green bananas are great because they will be ripe in a week and ready to eat. I have taken more notice of how far they travel to reach our grocery stores as they come green, compared to the bananas here in Costa Rica which come to the store a day or two after they were picked off of the tree.

            For loving bananas so much, my Tica mom had a hard time explaining how the history of Costa Rica was tied to bananas. She explained to me how important they were to the economy, because they supply jobs, create a market here in Costa Rica, and they are exported to many countries (specifically mentioning the United States). She also knew that most of the production was in Limon, but she didn’t really know the history of bananas in Costa Rica. Emphasizing that there used to be more production in the past, my Tica mom was almost embarrassed that she didn’t know the role of bananas in Costa Rican history or why there was less production of bananas today. This in itself showed me how important she thought bananas are to Costa Rica, because she would not have felt embarrassed if it was not important. My Tica grandmother contributed, stating how bananas used to be carried by train, but now they are carried more by ship and plane (true?).

            After talking with my family for about thirty minutes about bananas, I realized how much pride they had in their country for producing a fruit that is so popular in their own country but also others. My Tica mom emphasized how great it was that banana production was so great for supplying more jobs in Limon. She saw bananas as almost a symbol of Costa Rica that was currently benefiting them with more fruit, more jobs, and more money. As I thought about this, I was wondering if the States has a fruit that they take such pride in and see as a symbol. A company, such as Coca-Cola, could be seen as a symbol of the United States as discussed in Mintz’s theory of inside and outside meaning. Here both products give the country’s citizens something to take pride in and relate to, turning it into a symbol and representing some part of the culture. This is fascinating to me, because I think it is so interesting to understand how certain products became so important to their countries, just bananas became so important to Costa Rica. To me, the importance of bananas in Costa Rica leads me to think about the value they have in other countries because Costa Rica discovered just how perfect their country was for producing bananas at just the right timing in their history.