Bananas

Wow, what an amazing weekend.  I enjoy traveling independently -- getting to explore and choose what I want to do, but it’s definitely a treat to go on a guided trip once in a while.  This weekend’s adventure to a cacao farm and biological reserve was organized by ACM, so we had the luxury of a private (air-conditioned!!) bus, delicious meals, charismatic tour guides, and comfortable sleeping accommodations without having to stress about any of the planning.

We started our trip early Friday morning, leaving the ACM building at 7:30 for Finmac, an organic cacao farm and the site where I'll be doing my research project for two months!  On the way to the farm, we stopped at a banana plantation that provides fruit to Dole.  It was astounding to see the scale of production at just one plantation – this farm ships out around 3,000 45-pound crates of bananas every day.  Each crate holds about 100 bananas, so that’s 30,000 bananas a day.  Lots of potassium heading to the US from Costa Rica!  We got to walk among the banana plants and see the fruit being harvested.

Banana plant - you can see tiny bananas starting to form in the fruit on the left

Bananas grow on herbaceous plants, not trees, and each plant only produces one “fruit” in its lifetime (a fruit is a big bunch of around 30 bananas).  When the bananas are fully grown but still green, a worker chops off the stem of the banana tree, and hoists the very heavy fruit into a “train,” which is a system of metal boxes attached to cables that run from all parts of the plantation back to the processing area.  That banana plant will now die, but there is always a clonal offspring growing adjacent to the “mother” plant, which is nourished by the recently harvested plant until it produces its own fruit.  Domesticated bananas don’t reproduce by seeds, rather by this system of cloning, which means there is very little genetic variation between individuals and they are very susceptible to plagues.  

Recently cut banana plant.  The shorter plant attached to its left side is its offspring, and will grow to produce its own fruit in a few weeks.  It's hard to see in this small picture, but there's even a "grandson," a plant that's only a few inches high, growing alongside the offspring plant!

After filling up around 25 crates on the “train,” the worker hooks himself up to the whole contraption and drags the bananas along the cable to the processing area.  Far from the completely mechanized process of harvesting corn or soybeans in the US, this was a hands-on affair.  Seeing men hauling pounds and pounds of bananas, sometimes for miles, often jogging along the way, made me think a little bit about the concept of “exercise,” and how it’s kind of a strangely Western idea.  I think it’s important for my health to go running or go to the gym, but these men were obviously in excellent physical condition just as a result of their everyday life.  Instead of sitting all day long, at a desk or in a car or in front of the TV, with a break for exercise, activity is a huge part of normal daily activities.  I don’t necessarily think one mindset is better than the other one, but it’s interesting to think about and I wonder how I’ll feel about running while I’m living in this rural town for the months of March and April.

Banana "train" - a worker is pulling these bananas along the cable back towards the processing area

Once the bananas arrive at the processing area, they must be very carefully handled; US customers don’t like their bananas to have any blemishes or other imperfections.  The bananas are loaded onto a conveyor belt, which dumps them into giant basins of water to wash off the dirt.  From there, there is a sort of assembly line process in which workers take bananas out of the water, cut them into smaller bunches, apply Dole stickers, paint the recently cut top with a chemical to slow the ripening process, and pack them into crates for their journey to the US to top a bowl of cereal and yogurt. 

Bananas being taken to the processing area

The bananas pass down this assembly line, where they are washed, clipped into small bunches,stickered, and boxed up

I'm going to break this trip up into a couple posts because there's so much to share, but stay tuned for CHOCOLATE!!!