I Can't Stop Thinking About These Bananas

The banana industry knows exactly what you're looking for.

I’m trying this new thing where I write about the small (read: dumb) thoughts running through my mind (haunting me?) on the daily.

For example, I think about this article on New York City bananas at least once a week — basically, anytime I see, touch, eat, or otherwise consider the banana.

The article, from the New York Times, is essentially one about supply chain (pre-Covid, mind you). But the first time I read it, in 2017, I was struck by so many facts that I still can’t get out of my head:

It’s someone’s job to control the bananas.

This team goes around and makes sure the bananas are ripening at the appropriate rate for the market. If they’re ripening too fast — or not fast enough — someone changes the temperature of the little house the bananas are in, and repositions the bananas, to make sure everything is all good.

When we first moved to Atlanta and I was looking for a job, I saw a posting for Banana Twister and was like, hell yes I want this job. I have no experience in twisting bananas —

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(Eyebrows up)

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—but I still thought, this is exactly the type of thing I want to learn. I stayed on the corporate office circuit, but some days (many days) when I’m like omg f- all these emails and meetings what the hell am I doing and what value am I providing, I remember there’s a job out there where you check on bananas all day and make sure they’re ripening and think … should I?

There’s an entire banana rating system.

This might be my favorite insight from the piece.

So, the banana people rate all the bananas before they go out to the bodegas, ranging from one to seven. One is green as clover (or, “an outer borough cab” for anyone in Queens or Staten Island, I guess?); seven is basically right before it goes in the trash (or, if you’re Brad, into the freezer for about 18 months while it decomposes into a limp turd and then your partner accidentally touches it one day and screams out loud thinking it’s some sort of cold rat or piece of flesh. For example.)

Anyway, in an effort to sell super-ripe bananas, Chiquita created an entire marketing campaign with a jingle describing bananas as best when they’re flecked with brown (meaning, a six or a seven). Which, is just so god damn Mad Men brilliant and capitalist. It would be like if Kraft were to market to us “buy the mac and cheese boxes right before they expire, that’s when that powder is all good good.”

The impact is still there, because seven bananas are still the ones that boomers, like my parents (and Brad, somehow) prefer. A four — solid, canary yellow with a green stem — is the “millennial banana,” of which I’m firmly a supporter. I want the handle to crack like the spine of a new book, the fruit to have a bit of stiffness in it. I’m a millennial!

To this day, in our house, we rate the bananas using this system. The moment one starts flirting with a 5, I mark it for Brad.

This is a solid 4, but that one on top is def entering 5 territory.

The slipping on a banana peel cliche started in NYC at the turn of the 20th century.

In downtown New York there were so many food scraps (today, “compost”) littering the street that people started falling. The banana peels were among the worst offenders, and even after the city started cleaning the streets, it stuck as a bit through vaudeville and silent movies. And now, MarioKart.

Side note: There’s also a story about this woman who ended up going under investigation because she sued the city 17 times in four years for slipping on banana peels on city property. It happened so often that they looked into if her claims were legitimate.

I love that this lady was (ALLEGEDLY) going around the city – on the train, to the library, whatever – and would take a banana peel out of her purse and discretely position it on the floor for her to collapse over. This is my kind of front page news.

Can’t-miss news from 1910.

One time, when I was a kid, we were grocery shopping and my mom slipped on some oil in the aisle at Shaw’s and the whole staff came running and was like oh make sure she’s OK, and they announced something over the loudspeaker and shut down the oil aisle, and my mom was kind of dramatic about it, which I remember not really knowing why it was such a big deal. But now, I’m like, omg, they totally didn’t want a law suit, and maybe my mom was just an entrepreneur following in the footsteps of Mrs. Anna H. Sturla? (My mom did not sue btw, we’re not those people. And she still goes to Shaw’s, as far as I know.)

I haven’t thought of that story of my mom until two minutes ago, writing this, but I do think about banana peels littering downtown every time I throw out compost a peel.

Bonus: Here’s what struck me in re-reading this today.

Google let me know that I have visited this page eleven times since it was published, my last read in late 2019. So, it’s been a minute. But there’s some really good quotes in here that I liked re-reading.

I think this is my favorite:

It was a tough business: nocturnal, low profit, full of headaches. “What goes on,” he said, shaking his head. “Rainstorms, snowstorms, the Jersey Turnpike.”

And, back in the day, the receiving teams in NYC would open the hatch of the shipments and there would be all sorts of creatures (including snakes!) among the bananas. Which, omg.

And finally, probably because it’s a pandemic (stay safe!), this stuck out to me this time:

Bananas as we know them won’t exist some day. There’s some disease going around that is bound to get into the bananas we know and love. There isn’t really anything we can do about it. They’re trying to make a banana that isn’t able to fall victim to this, but it might come at the risk of flavor.

So, enjoy/rate/twist/hug your bananas today. Because who knows – you might not have them tomorrow.