Dear Umbra,
Why are organic bananas always smaller and almost always greener than non-organic?
BG
Tallahassee, Fla.
Dearest BG,
Hmm. Fresh organic fruits and vegetables often differ in appearance from their conventionally grown kin. They're the hippies of the produce world: unwaxed, expressing their individualism, coming to the produce stand as they are, lumps and all. Although I notice this has changed some over the past couple decades as organic farming has become industrialized and the produce has become more uniform.
Smaller size can be a result of organic production methods. When a conventional plant receives synthetic substances targeted at maximum fruit production, and a farmer can apply pesticides whenever a sickly plant (fed on little of substance) starts to lag, the fruit can get quite large. Organic farmers have to pay a bit more attention to the health of the whole farm, the whole plant, and can't just push plants to the max. As a result the fruit is smaller. I'm not claiming to know much about banana production, but I have seen this effect with other produce. So I think organic bananas may be smaller than conventional bananas because -- well, probably because organic banana plants are healthier. Those gigantic bananas to which we are accustomed are just plain old weird.
There are other reasons for different appearances in organic fruit. The variety of fruit might be unusual -- say, you might be seeing a Jonagold variety apple instead of only Red Delicious. I thought this might be the reason for your smaller banana. I now believe that all the basic yellow sweet bananas in the same general size are the Cavendish variety. Cavendish completely dominates the export banana markets, and the other bananas we might see look fairly different: smaller, fatter, green.
Other reasons for a different appearance in organics would be fewer pesticides and fertilizers leading to a less cartoonishly perfect fruit; or maybe no waxing leading to a less blindingly shiny fruit. I don't, however, think "greener" counts as less perfect with bananas. You know that bananas are picked unripe and shipped from somewhere tropical to you. In order to sell, the bananas must be close to ripe by the time they reach the store, but not too ripe. Apparently it's quite tricky to get the timing right. Much of banana shipping is done under refrigeration. So, another batch of assumptions here, your bananas may be greener due to the habits of the vendor. That organic banana vendor just keeps things a little greener. It could be -- could be -- that organic farmers have to ship their bananas greener because there's a ripening retardation chemical they can't use under organic certification, but I looked pretty hard and could not confirm that theory of mine.
We should all know a little more about bananas, which are the world's most popular fruit -- and thought to be one of the world's oldest as well. Banana plants are not trees. They are giant herbs, just as if oregano grew 25 feet tall. The cluster we buy at the store was once part of a larger cluster called a "hand." They are incredibly popular and also incredibly important as a basic foodstuff. Most are grown in developing countries, with Ecuador, the Philippines, Costa Rica, and Colombia dominating the export market. However, exports make up only 15 percent of world banana production, which totals 115 million tons! The rest are grown for local sales or for home cooking.
There shouldn't be anything wrong with your greener bananas. Take 'em home, let them ripen at room temperature for a few days, and then have a tasty snack. Keep buying organic, especially as it benefits the health and living environment of the producers. As we have discussed in the past, however, if you have a limited budget or are desperate for fruit in a place without organics, you can prioritize your purchases -- and bananas are an OK choice for buying conventionally grown, as they have less pesticide residue than other choices.
Handily,
Umbra
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Comments
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miken32 Posted 2:07 am
27 Feb 2008
Where I live, organic (Dole) bananas are about 79¢ a pound, compared to 59¢ for non-organic. Your pricing may vary, but for me it's a no-brainer.
P.S. Interesting banana fact: all Cavendish bananas produced today are clones of an original from the 1950s. Bananas are sterile and can't reproduce naturally.
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zengrrl Posted 3:53 am
27 Feb 2008
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wolfger Posted 5:02 am
27 Feb 2008
See http://www.eatmorebananas.com/facts/ripening.htm
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Ashley Braun Posted 10:31 am
27 Feb 2008
Banana Nut Bread
2 1/2 cp flour
1 cp sugar
3 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp salt
3 T. salad oil
3/4 cp milk
1 egg
1 cp mashed ripe banana (2-3 medium)
1 cp finely chopped nuts
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 9x5x3-inch loaf pan or 2 8.5x4.5x2.5-inch loaf pans. Measure all ingredients into large mixer bowl; beat on medium speed 1/2 minute, scraping side and bottom of bowl constantly. Pour into pan(s). Bake 55-65 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove from pan; cool thoroughly before slicing.
Enjoy delicious banana bread.
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JLJ4774 Posted 12:12 pm
27 Feb 2008
The ethylene gas hastens the ripening process so that the bananas are less green than they would normally be. Remember that rules of organics stipulate no artificial chemicals or non-natural methods for ripening. Your organic bananas that you pay almost twice the price for are NOT suffocated in noxious ethylene gas, unlike their cheaper much more attractive, and potentially hazardous counterparts.
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timhammond Posted 10:02 pm
27 Feb 2008
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sarahbei Posted 11:06 pm
27 Feb 2008
Yet another example of how mass industrialization of agriculture is bad for us. Africa is going to be particularly screwed since bananas make up a very important portion of the average African diet (so I heard).
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1909 ...
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willa Posted 12:40 am
28 Feb 2008
In any case, like the first commenter, I buy organic bananas for the workers' sake more than my own. In my area organic is twice the price (99c. vs. 49c.), but they also taste better, so it's no big.
In other banana news, a couple of months ago I was putting together a fruit basket of organic fruits from my local health food store, and in addition to apples, oranges, pears, etc, some little mini bananas caught my eye. They were maybe 4" long and not as bright yellow as Cavendish, but so adorable I couldn't resist putting some in the basket. Then when I went to actually assemble the fruit I had bought into the basket, I found that the bananas wouldn't all fit, so I split the bunch and got a few to eat myself...and OH MY GOD those things were delicious. If they had them all the time, I'd probably eat those exclusively instead of "normal" bananas. They were sweeter yet simultaneously more tart and delicately flavorful than a regular banana. If you see these, I highly recommend buying some!
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ruth117 Posted 3:42 am
28 Feb 2008
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marcus goodfellow Posted 3:44 am
28 Feb 2008
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seattlepam Posted 10:56 am
28 Feb 2008
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ladycat Posted 1:48 pm
28 Feb 2008
That makes me mad but they are still safer than the non-organic, so I still buy them.
Organic bananas in the store I shop are 79 cents a pound compared to 49 cents for the regular. It's well worth it to me to pay the extra.
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spaceshaper Posted 8:59 pm
28 Feb 2008
Enjoy your organic bananas while ye may.
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crunchychicken Posted 9:48 am
29 Feb 2008
I know it's opposite of what everyone thinks, but the smaller ones are so much tastier!
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mkrugman Posted 1:54 am
01 Mar 2008
But by your own admission, you know virtually nothing about banana production, beyond a few stats you grabbed off the 'net, nor have you bothered to do any in-depth research as far as I can see.
So what is the purpose of this article--just to get people chatting? Or is it perhaps here, in the Comments section, that we the readers are supposed to supply the content for your article? Maybe it is YOU who should be chiding me for not doing MY research? If so, I quit!
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Leprof Posted 5:20 am
02 Mar 2008
buy organic bananas to reduce the massive pesticide load dumped into the local environments surrounding banana farms.
Better yet, switch to a fruit that isn't farmed in monoculture on cleared tropical rainforest land, then shipped an ungodly distance to your grocery store.
Another note:
Beautiful fruit is not the same as quality fruit. As an example, juice oranges, bred for actual quality of the juice, look pretty ratty (but we never have to see them). The nice bulging orange oranges of supermarkets have been bred for beauty as much as for fruit quality. Furthermore, much of the pesticide application on orange-growing farms is geared at getting supermarket oranges to look nice, not at actually improving the culinary or gastronomical qualities of the orange.
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mwildfire Posted 11:58 pm
03 Mar 2008
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Bobbi Katsanis Posted 1:05 am
04 Mar 2008
I know that there have been studies (or at least one) indicating that locally-grown doesn't always win the prize - but I have yet to locate a detailed description of what was measured with these studies. It's like the British nappy study which found that cloth & disposable come out about even. Well, friends, that study was descriptive not prescriptive, and so measured the ecological footprint of the way people use cloth diapers - washed in a nearly-empty washing machine on HOT and dried in the dryer. I haven't been able to get hold of the details of that study either, but I suspect that it did not take fully into account the fact that a cloth diaper's useful life is somewhere passing 30+ years (my mother's still using mine to dust furniture) and they DON'T end up in a landfill.
The point is that if we environmentalists make use of these studies to endorse certain ecological bad habits without checking the specifics... well, that's just bad karma.
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PermieWriter Posted 1:23 am
04 Mar 2008
And I understand RMI grows bananas in their HQ in Colorado. It's amazing what you can do with a little glass and some smart siting.
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caseyreagan Posted 10:59 am
04 Mar 2008
duh.
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Storm Dragon Posted 4:26 am
05 Mar 2008
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jordanbaram Posted 1:33 am
11 Mar 2008
-There is no such thing as a cheap banana. The current banana system can basically be described as one where poor people in Latin America subsidize our banana consumption in the US with their physical and environmental health.
-I was surprised that there is not mention of fair trade, currently the only attempt to internalize the actual costs of production into the price that American consumers pay for their bananas.
-The biggest winners in the banana trade are the supermarkets that make large profits on America's most popular fruit.
-Organic and conventional bananas get exposed to ethylene gas as well as heat and moisture to wake them up from their refrigeration induced hibernation from their ocean transit.
-Plastic bags are used with organic banana production thought they are not impregnated with pesticides or they are impregnated with non-synthetic pesticide (like those derived from chili pepper or garlic). The plastic bags protect the skins from insects. Fair Trade certification stipulates that those plastic bags are collected and recycled and not allowed to get caught in steams.
-The greenness of organic probably owes mostly to lack of volume. Getting banana color right from a ripening/distribution perspective is all about continuous flow and volume (think of running water). The much much smaller volume of organic bananas means the stream of bananas is less regular and full. This makes it harder for the ripeners and distributors and retailers to get the color right all of the time.
-I believe strongly that organic bananas should be purchased for the sake of worker and environmental health at origin. However, as industrial organic has proliferated in the US it has also done so with tropical fruit. In the case of bananas, this means that folks are planting in higher altitude, dryer, more desert like regions to avoid the threat of moisture-loving airborne fungi and irrigating. These are incredibly fragile ecosystems that may be damaged by this sort of production and yet the bananas can be certified organic because no synthetic chemicals are used. Meanwhile there are growers in the traiditional lowlands regions who grow a "cleaner" IPM banana using less dangerous and lower quantities of pesticides. The black and white thinking of organic/not-organic is dangerous.
-Through decades of intense marketing, the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole) taught Americans that a banana is supposed to have perfect yellow skin and be just the right size and shape. This aesthetic canon is incredibly destructive and is the driving force behind the use of plastic bags and intense chemicals. Banana farmers know that if the peel is not perfect (regardless of how the fruit tastes) then then they can't export the fruit so they have very strong incentives to produce flawless looking fruit no matter the environmental cost. The most sustainable banana production I have heard about is a poly-culture farm in Costa Rica that grows bananas next to cacao, next to mangos and coffee. It is totally organic but they can't export any of their bananas fresh because of the way the skinds look so they sell them for puree for organic baby food. In addition to fairer trade, the most radical thing Americans can do would be to re-imagine the way a bananas is supposed to look in line with the way that bananas look in local markets in the south. Nobody, not even fair traders or banana Union folks, are attempting to raise these sorts of questions.
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