Bananas: Nature's Institution for the Promotion of Laziness

by Edward Wilkin Perry

Statements made by other analysts seem to warrant the deduction that the nutritive value of a ton of potatoes, at one cent per pound, is 19 cents more than that of a ton of bananas at the same price. There is a difference, too, in the cost of production of a ton of potatoes and the cost of raising a ton of bananas. The field for potatoes must be plowed and harrowed in the spring, the seed dropped in furrows, which are then to be covered, after which comes cultivating again and again until the time has come for digging and picking, carting, sacking and hauling, often to a distant market.

Luckily for the millions who have depended so largely on the banana for sustenance, the plant has few, if any, insect enemies and diseases, in which they differ somewhat from some fruits and tubers of the North.

Many times an assertion has been printed to the effect that Humboldt said that an acre of bananas yields forty-four times as much food as does an acre of wheat. In the year 1902 the average yield of wheat in the United States equalled 12.79 bushels, or 767.4 pounds. This had a food value equal to nearly one-third that of the average output of bananas from an acre. It is often said that one pound of bananas has as much nutrition as has a pound of beef. The truth is that one pound of beef is worth three and one-third pounds of bananas. Bananas are far enough ahead of the harvests the farmer of the North gets, without making exaggerated claims for the fruit of the tropics.

So the planter of bananas has each year four and a half times as much palatable food from an acre as the farmer gets from his potatoes: and there is the further difference that the one has bananas at no other cost than that of keeping down bush and grass and vine, that would quickly cover every spot to which the sunshine could penetrate, along the edges of the plantation. For bananas yield year after year without replanting. Each new stalk springs from the foot of its parent, grows to a height of fifteen to thirty-five feet, bears its burden of luscious fruit, and dies; but not before it has sent up from its own root new stalks to fruit and die—and so on through the centuries.

He who would grow bananas for market must plant on the border of navigable waters giving access to some harbor or anchorage where ships may safely lie while receiving the fruit. For it is easily bruised, and wetting by salt water blackens the skins, thus injuring or preventing the sale. Plantations are usually on the banks of rivers or of estuaries, but some are beside railroads, to which the fruit is carried by carts thickly carpeted with banana leaves. A cruder way is to hang a few bunches over the back of a burro or of a mule, which plods along to the shipping place.

It is evident that the entire area which can so be devoted to banana culture must be small, for most Central American and Mexican rivers are obstructed at their mouths by sandbars, over which ships cannot pass. Bluefields, Nicaragua, has been a most profitable field for banana growing, because it has a river into which sea-going ships can safely enter, and up which such ships may go fifty or sixty miles, and receive their cargoes from landings on the plantations which border the Rio Escondido. Yet millions of bunches of bananas have been shipped from the open coast of Honduras, where the one good harbor is that at Puerto Cortez.

Other millions have been shipped from Port Limón and from Bocas del Toro, in Costa Rica, whence a few hundred bunches were sent as a beginning to the United States in the year 1883. Twenty years later the port of Limón itself sent 4,174,200 bunches to the markets of the world. They brought to Costa Rica credit for producing the best bananas known.

For ages the native of banana lands was content with the fact that he got from his plantation more than enough food. Some thirty-five years ago a few bold men ventured to pay twelve or fifteen cents a bunch for a few cargoes in the Bay Islands, off the coast of Honduras, and carried them to the Gulf States. There they found they could sell the fruit, for there lived people who had traveled to the tropics, and learned to eat their foods. To-day millions of bunches are each year sold in the United States and even in Canada, and in 1902 ship-loads were sent from Costa Rica direct to Europe. That little republic alone received not less than $1,127,400 for bananas sold abroad during the year that ended with September, 1902.

The United Fruit Company, of Boston, was formed in the year 1888, and ten years later was said to have a surplus of more than $6,000,000, owned thousands of acres of bananas, and had built expressly for its fruit carrying business four superb steamers, and employed many others.

It is safe to assume that more than $6,000,000 was paid in the year 1902, in Central America alone, to planters of bananas. Nearly all of that was paid by products of American farms, factories and forests. Farmer, manufacturer and miner, lumberman, railroad man and sailor, merchant and broker of this country, are all concerned in and benefited by the work done in shady aisles beneath banana leaves on the banks of tropic rivers.