- [Man] The American nation can not, must now, and will not,
from empty establishment, form another communist government. - This is called a Cavendish banana. It's the most common banana on earth. It's probably the one that you have in your kitchen right now. It's definitely the one you
see in the grocery store. This banana was created in a
fancy looking house in England. Yes, created and yes, in England. Kind of weird, bananas
aren't from England. They're originally from
Asia and there are thousands of different kinds of bananas. So how did this banana, the Cavendish that was created in England become the banana that you eat today? Well, the answer to that is not so simple. You have to understand the
story of bananas, which yes, is something we're diving into today. It's a story filled with
predatory corporations and geopolitics and American
imperialism and disease, and really some amazing marketing. It explains how
corporations can grow so big that they begin to act like
governments, like dictators. And it explains why this
banana, the Cavendish, the one you know and love,
might not exist soon. - [Woman] The world's most popular banana may be on the verge of extinction. Oh, and while I was diving deep into this, I discovered that there's a
better tasting banana out there. One that isn't supposed to exist anymore, but I got my hands on some
and yes, they're better. So buckle up. This is the F'd up history of bananas. We're pausing this story really
quick because I just need to thank the sponsor of today's
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the post office again. So bananas are from Southeast
Asia, but like 400 years ago, Europeans were taking over the world and the Portuguese brought
bananas over to the Americas. A few hundred years later, an American sailor was in Jamaica and he found this funny
looking exotic yellow fruit and money started flashing in his eyes. He started selling bananas to Americans who quickly loved this new fruit. Bananas were trending. People were talking about it. So then fast forward to
nearly the end of the 1800s. And you have the World's Fair, where all the people show up and show off their new technology. At the fair you've got this guy, Alexander Graham bell, who's showing up with his
cute little new invention that's about to change the world. But another crowd favorite
at the expo was the banana. Yes, bananas were equally as impressive as the telephone at the World's Fair. The banana business started
booming in the United States. Much of these bananas flowing
in from New York City. The port there was dubbed
Banana Docks for a while because of so much fruit import. So now you have all these
Americans eating the sweet, creamy, delicious fruit, and throwing the slippery
peels onto the street. It got so bad that the police
commissioner at the time, oh God, I can't get away from this guy. Teddy Roosevelt once again. I swear I get into any story, I like to start to research it. And it's like, yeah. And then there's an American imperialism. And Teddy Roosevelt shows up. Anyway, so Teddy Roosevelt, the police commissioner starts
putting a fine on people for throwing their banana
peels on the sidewalk. Like this isn't just
like a silly, fake joke. It's like, this is a real thing. People slipped on banana peels. - Patrick, banana peel! - What did you say? (screams) - And you could go to jail
for it. I mean, look at this. There's this New York Times article documenting Teddy Roosevelt, the police commissioner, speaking to a room of police
captains, explaining quote, the bad habits of banana
skins and dwelling particularly on its tendency
to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement. This was a real issue. Banana Docks, Teddy Roosevelt,
slippery banana peels, silly newspaper articles
from the late 1800s. This isn't the story here.
We're just getting started. This is banana's innocent phase. It's about to heat up. Let's see how bananas
turned from this to this. (upbeat music) The banana business
people in the US realized it was time to ramp up to
meet all of this new demand. But instead of just importing
more bananas from say Jamaica or other countries
in the Caribbean, the banana companies realized that they needed to
control the supply chain. Let me explain what I mean by second, by looking at this banana. Bananas are fragile. They're soft. They spoil in like a week, but this one's like
moments away from spoiling. Look at those spots. To get this thing from
somewhere close to the equator all the way to New York City
and then into someone's market and then into somebody's home
all without it being crushed and without it spoiling is a fragile, quick, expensive process. And the only way to do it
profitably is to do a lot of it. A lot of bananas. (upbeat music) And the only way to do a lot of bananas is to control the supply chain. So it's like 1900 at this point, there's a banana gold rush happening. And there's a bunch of
companies trying to figure out how to control the supply chain. And then they decided to sort
of merge together and become this one super company called
the United Fruit Company. And their plan for combining was to control everything,
control the supply chain. They turned their attention
completely to Central America where they know bananas
could grow abundantly, and where, oh, look at this. The US is thinking about
making a little canal that cuts through this little narrow strip of land. So the United Fruit Company is like, that's kind of a nice perk for the region. If anything goes wrong, the US could have our backs. Foreshadowing. Am I foreshadowing? I'm foreshadowing. So yeah, United Fruit Company is like, this region, central America , looks like a great neighborhood
to control the supply chain. They wanted to control
the people who worked on the farm by owning
their basic survival needs. They wanted to control
the houses they lived in and the stores they shopped
in and what they could buy. They wanted to control the
transportation by building railways so that they could quickly ship their product onto ports. They wanted to control the
boats and the waterways so that they could get all of these
bananas from Central America to the US before they spoiled. They started with Guatemala, pouring tons of investment into controlling every inch
of their supply chain. Soon, they were the largest
company in Guatemala. They owned a fifth of the
farmable land in the country. They owned all of the railways and all of the radio stations
and radio infrastructure. And by 1901, the government of Guatemala
actually hired the United Fruit Company to manage
the country's postal service. What? United Fruit was starting to
look a lot like a government. And the result was a lot of
happy banana eating Americans. So they kept going. They kept expanding their
operations across Central America. So now with all of this
beautiful infrastructure and trains and land, the next strategy for making
bananas even more profitable was, you guessed it, paying
the workers next to nothing. And paying them not with real money. (upbeat music) A lot of the times United Fruit paid their workers in vouchers. These vouchers could only be used in designated United Fruit commissaries. So they're not actually
making real money here. So wait, now the United fruit
Company has its own currency? Oh, and they also had like a private Navy, 93 boats called the Great White Fleet. Then eventually they
started using these boats to transport people on cruises. These boats were even
used during World War II. United Fruit started to look
like a literal government. They had their hands in
everything so much so that they earned their
self the nickname El Pulpo, which means the octopus in Spanish, meaning they had their
tentacles in everything all over Central America, the
land, the crops, the people, the infrastructure, and soon
enough government agencies. Soon these countries
became so dominated by and reliant on the United Fruit Company that they were no longer run by the people or the governments. They were run by American banana companies who had all the power and
leverage in the world. This led to the nickname Banana Republic, which is a politically unstable
country whose society is exploited for profit
for one single product, in this case bananas. And probably not the best
sort of thing to name your clothing store after, but just a thought, but
like who made that decision? United Fruit and other banana companies continued to grow and
control Central America. Eventually people got tired of this. In 1911, Honduras was like,
all right, we're done, banana companies. We're going to take back our land. We can take it from here.
These are our plantations. You've gone too far. Banana
companies didn't like this. So they organized a private
army to help overthrow the government so that they
could put in a president that they liked who would allow them to keep doing exactly what they were doing and also give them a tax break. So yeah, banana companies are now
overthrowing governments. Jeez. This kept happening. Anytime there was political
dissent or the governments of these countries started
to step up and say no, the banana companies would intervene, and guess who had their back? The US military, and yes, we're back to Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt. What a guy. Here's Teddy stomping around the Caribbean with his big stick, making sure that American
military and business interests are protected, in Honduras alone, the US invaded seven
times in the early 1900s, all in the name of protecting
these banana companies and other US interests from having to face these pesky locals who were so audacious as to
want to run their own country. How dare they? If you remember that at this time, the US was starting to get
really comfortable with empire behavior and central America was at the top of the priority list. The banana companies knew this, which allowed them to feel emboldened, to just sort of do whatever
they wanted in the region. But this is sort of child's play. It started to get a
lot worse in the 1920s. (upbeat music) There was a situation in
Colombia where a bunch of workers for the United Fruit Company
decided to stop working and protest their working conditions. They were asking for a few
things like, I don't know, working six days a week instead of seven, or getting paid real money. The United Fruit Company
refuses to negotiate with them. And instead goes to the
US and says, hey, USA, we've got these really
annoying workers who are trying to unionize and
trying to get paid and stuff. And it actually smells
a lot like communism. And the US is like, wait, what, communism? Tell me more. So then the US threatens to invade with their Marines and squash this strike if the Colombian military
doesn't do something first. Reminder that we're not talking about some big political
revolution or rebellion. We're talking about a few
workers in a banana plantation protesting for more humane conditions. And yet this was a priority
for the US government to put pressure on Colombia
to fix the situation. Of course, Columbia didn't
want to make the US angry. So they responded and
sent in their own troops to go put down this workers' strike. And they were ordered to quote, spare no ammunition. So on December 5th, 1928, these protesters are in the town square in this town in Columbia. And the Colombian army
shows up and massacres them. Men, women, and children were
killed by their own military all because an American banana company didn't want to pay them a decent wage. I mean, this is madness. It is madness to think that
these large geopolitical forces were coming to bear over
a banana plantation. This event is called the Banana Massacre. This didn't stop in 1928, fast forward to Guatemala in the 1950s. At this point, the United Fruit Company, El Pulpo, is making major profits. They own almost 50% of the
land in Guatemala tax-free. But this president, Jacobo Arbenz, who was democratically elected
is trying to change things. He wants to take land
that United Fruit owns but isn't using and redistribute
it to poor Guatemalans. He's sort of doing like
a Robin Hood thing, trying to like lift poor
Guatemalans out of poverty. But of course, United
Fruit didn't like this, but instead of engaging directly with the Guatemalan government, United Fruit goes to the white house and says those magic
words again, communism. United Fruit then hired this PR magician who happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew. And he worked with news
agencies to create a bunch of fake stories that linked Arbenz, the president of Guatemala to communism, completely fake news. And not just like using that word lightly, like he created a fake
Guatemalan newspaper, created all these fake reports and then distributed those
fake newspapers to Congress. He planted the seeds in their minds that United Fruit Company
were the good guys and that Arbenz, the democratically elected leader, needed to go because of communism. It totally worked. President Eisenhower, the president of the United
States believed all of this. And he sent in the CIA to
get Arbenz out of power to protect the banana people once again. It's a classic CIA coup, they
go find a bunch of rebels. They give them money and they train them. - [Radio Announcer] Rebels rose to oust Guatemala's red infiltrated government. - They find a leader who
wants to be the next president that's friendly to the US
and eventually they start broadcasting anti-government propaganda, and they turn Guatemalans
against their government with all of this fake news and propaganda. They send the Navy in to
block Guatemalan waters. They send some bombs onto Guatemala city, and then they invade. (dramatic music) And then with these trained fighters, they go take over the government, the Guatemalan army surrenders, and the leader of the rebels becomes the new president friendly
to the United States. And now the banana companies
are happy and they have a guy in power that is their guy. It's like they have a playbook on how to mess with democracies around the world. And they just sort of
followed the playbook. They're like, oh, we've done this before. We're going to do it again
in Iran in a little bit. This is classic CIA coup, by the way, this coup was sort of a death blow to democracy in Guatemala. It divided and destroyed
the budding civil society that has not allowed
Guatemala to recover since, all because these banana companies wanted to control the supply chain. These things leave scars, major scars, major marks on a country, scars
that are still felt today. Let's switch gears for a
second because all of these banana coups and banana republics and massacres is like horrendous. But during all of this violence and military invasions and
human rights violations, all of this meant that
the United Fruit Company was getting really, really
good at their business. They were sending too many
bananas to the United States. There was a ton of bananas supplied, but demand wasn't rising fast enough. The average American didn't
totally know how to use bananas. So the United Fruit Company creates this amazing marketing campaign. (upbeat music) So now they're paying
doctors to write amazing academic journal articles about bananas. They cut a deal with
Kellogg's to market the cereal as something that pairs with bananas, which is something I still do today. I cut up my bananas and
I put them in my cereal because of this campaign. They targeted moms with small children. They made recipe books. They even created a guide on
how to decorate with bananas. - [TV Broadcaster]
Bananas can to be served in many different and
many attractive ways. Blended with fruits, nuts, and gelatin, they provide high food
value with nourishment. - But their biggest
success was Miss Chiquita. ♪ I'm Chiquita Banana
and I've come to say ♪ ♪ bananas have to ripen
in a certain way. ♪ ♪ And when they're flecked with
brown and have a golden hue ♪ ♪ Bananas taste the best
and are the best for you. ♪ - The American public fell in love with this lady and bananas. They had no idea that these bananas that were being produced and
shipped and bought with blood, they just liked how they taste. But isn't that the case
with a lot of things that we all consume every day. But there's one thing that US
imperialism and millions of dollars of marketing cannot
control, which is disease. This is the part of the
story that I tell you that the bananas that were all the rage during the 1900s are not the bananas that you're eating today. (upbeat music) Part of United Fruit Company's
efforts to control everything was standardizing the
genetics of the banana, making them all exactly the same. Monocultures is what we call that. The problem with monocultures
is that they are heaven for a disease because
you don't have to solve the same puzzle to infect another banana. If you infect one, you infect them all. And that's exactly what happened. Panama disease was a fungus that came in and destroyed banana plantations. The banana supply in
the US shrank rapidly. And there was even a hit song
about the banana shortage. ♪ We have no bananas today ♪ The banana that they had been using, the one that was getting
really popular in the US was called the Gros Michel,
or the Big Mike banana, but it was now completely
getting ravaged by disease. So these banana companies
are freaking out. They're like, we are done, we've built this entire empire and this disease is going to wipe us out. So they started to scramble
to find another banana. It turns out there's like a thousand types of bananas out there. There's red ones and
blue ones and teal ones. I mean, a blue banana. I feel like I have to eat a blue banana at some point in my life,
but here's the problem. Us Americans, we buy our food
kind of with our eyes first. We're just like, it needs to look good. And so these companies
realized they couldn't send a blue banana to the United States. They needed a banana that
looked similar, yellow, sweet and seedless so that
they could keep selling to Americans who hopefully
wouldn't notice the switch. Enter our friend, the Cavendish banana ♪ God save the precious queen ♪ Like I said at the beginning, this banana was invented by a
British guy who was tinkering with banana seeds in this
amazing looking house in Northern England. And after years of playing
around with the genetics, the plant finally flowered
and popped out this big, beautiful yellow banana. And so he named it after
the Duke William Cavendish. So now here's the sad part. The Gros Michel, the one that had caught on
that was like the big hit in America was a way better banana, is a way better banana. It is sweeter. It's more durable and it's
just overall a better banana compared to the Cavendish. In fact, the artificial banana flavor
that we have in our candies, like Laffy Taffy comes from
the original Gros Michel, not from the Cavendish, but the Gros Michel was getting
destroyed by this disease. And the Cavendish was luckily
resistant to the disease. So the dictator banana companies
made the switch and hoped that the people wouldn't care or notice as long as they looked the same. And guess what? It totally worked. They quietly switched out the
banana to the new Cavendish and people just kept buying bananas. I mean, I can't believe that there
is a better banana out there that I have not tasted. I wonder if I can get my hands on one. (upbeat music) The Gros Michel banana still exists. It's just a select few people
on this planet still grow it. And I found a farm that sent me a few. I'm going to try this thing. Gros Michel. Let's do this Beautiful banana. Wow. I'm obviously primed to like this more so I don't know if I'm
really liking it more, but it's definitely a better
banana right now in my mind. Slightly different color. It's got this like burgundy vibe going on. It's sweeter. I like the texture more. I think this is a better banana. Too bad this thing got completely
wiped out by a disease. So let's get up to speed
before we finish the story off, because the last part of
it is quite interesting and applies to our modern day. To summarize, came to the US, predatory
companies invaded whole countries to help the US exploit them for bananas while using amazing
marketing to keep demand up. And because of this Panama Disease, they had to switch to the
inferior Cavendish banana. So where do we go from here? United fruit eventually
rebranded to Chiquita. They're still doing
some pretty shady stuff like paying millions
of dollars to terrorist death squads and getting sued by workers who've become sterile
after handling pesticides. Banana companies will
probably always do this. Because the other thing that remains is that bananas are still soft and spoil quickly and grow in far away places from where you eat them. So the entire supply chain
needs to be controlled. And the other thing that
hasn't changed is that the new banana is genetically optimized so that every banana is exactly the same. So it fits perfectly into these boxes, into these crates, onto these ships, into these supermarkets. But guess what? There's another disease. The Panama disease, the one that wiped out the Gros Michel, it's back and it's mutated, and it's coming for the Cavendish. And what's tricky about these
diseases is there's no way to detect them before they
arrive before it's too late. It just quietly kills the banana trees and makes it impossible
to ever grow there again, you have to burn the entire plantation. This is already happening
in the Philippines, which is the second largest
exporter of bananas, the disease has devastated the
land and the banana economy. It's making its way through Asia. But Asia is super far away and it's like, there's a whole ocean in between. All our bananas come from
Latin America. Wrong. In 2019, it was detected in Colombia. And in April of this year,
just a few months ago, the disease was found in
Peru, right next to Ecuador, which is the largest exports
of bananas that come to the US. It's coming for your bananas. So everyone's on high alert and bananas as we know them might be doomed. So now we're seeing history
kind of repeat itself. We're looking at the potential collapse of a $25 billion industry
and entire economies, which is like hundreds
of thousands of jobs. (dramatic music) To me, the big problem here, the thing that's repeating
itself is the same problem of United Fruit Company going
in and trying to control every angle of their
production to maximize profits. When we have companies
that feel emboldened to do whatever it takes
to make the most profit, you're going to get situations like this, whether it is banana massacres in Columbia or a coup in Honduras or a monoculture that
gets wiped out by disease time and time again, we try to engineer our
way out of these problems and we sometimes do, but
at the end of the day, nature will catch up with us. And as long as we ignore the
true cost of these economies, the cost to people, to
democracies, to ecologies, we're never actually going
to get rid of these problems. Thanks for watching. I'm going to eat a Cavendish now. See you.
You mean all this time I could of used blood to buy bananas instead of using my money like a chump????
Simply waking up under capitalism entails your complicity with another’s suffering. The point is not to boycott corporation after corporation; the point is to change the system itself.
So, what, he's not going to pack bananas when he goes on his next 'fact finding' trip overseas for a video?
That's bananas!