These motherfuckers have such an intense PR machine that approximately 80% of

what I found when I was researching glorified the banana. And there are a lot of
wonderful things about the banana. I mean, aside from a nutritional/food
standpoint, I learned that you can do the following just with the banana peel
alone:
1. Polish your shoes
2. Extract poison ivy oil/bug bite venom out of your body
3. Remove a wart
4. Remove a splinter
5. Cure acne
6. Polish silverware
7. Whiten your teeth

OTHER WEIRD BANANA TIDBITS

 The banana is the 4th most exported and widely eaten food after: wheat,
rice and milk.
 twinkies used to be banana flavored which makes sense because they are
in the shape of a banana!

Now, today’s podcast centers around the 1974 Chiquita Banana Cookbook,
obviously brought to us by the Chiquita Banana company, purveyors of delicious
penile shaped fruit and human rights violators extraordinaire. So, as we lay out
our historical landscape, I thought I would bring you the history of the Chiquita
company, formally known as the United Fruit Company or, as I lovingly refer to it:
BIG FRUIT

Now, the Chiquita Banana company and the modern banana business as we know
it can be traced back to two white men and the entire country of Honduras but,
let’s first concentrate on these two white men—they are:
 Minor Copper Keith
 Sam Zemurray, the abusive fathers of the banana movement in the US. OK:
let me tell you about Minor Copper Keith:

 Minor Copper Keith was born in Brooklyn NY on January 19th, 1848.

 His father was a railroad builder, his mother was heir to a giant lumber
fortune.
 In 1869, when Minor Keith was 21, his father bought him a cattle ranch in
TX but Minor wasn’t into it so he teamed up with his uncle a few years later
in 1971 to build a railroad in Costa Rica.

 DEATH IN THE JUNGLE: Despite popular belief, building a railroad in the

middle of the jungle is pretty arduous work and several thousands of
people died in the building of the railroad. In 1874, Minor’s uncle was just
fed up with the work and gave minor the company.

 PR issue #1—The local Costa Rican’s were like, um, we’re not fucking doing
this back breaking shit and risk disease for little to no pay. So, in order to
finish the railroad, Minor employed over 700 murderers and thieves from
the New Orleans jails to finish the work. By the time it was finished, there
were 25 surviving convicts.

 While he was creating this railroad, he was feeding his workers bananas.
Bananas which he would plant along the route of the railway because they
were cheap. HE was like his own craft services truck but just bananas. And
also his workers died from extreme heat, exhaustion, and disease, so worst
craft services truck ever.

 not enough passengers throughout central America and he had banks

breathing down his neck so he made the decision to start transporting
these bananas he was growing throughout central America and sending
them to a port where they would be shipped to the US. This new
experiment proved successful and by 1883 Keith owned three banana
export companies. By 1890 the train was used solely for transporting
bananas and the new plantations surpassed the value of the train.

 Now, let’s take that train up to the port and head on over to the US and the
general banana reception.

 In 1870, a year after Minor left to basically run Costa Rica, a man named
Captain Lorenzo Baker brought some bananas from Jamaica to JERSEY CITY
—and tried to sell them. He teamed up with some other white dudes and
 created the Boston Fruit company and distributed bananas from the West
Indies.

 1876 they were brought to the world’s fair in Philadelphia—same world fair
where Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone. They were cut up
and sold in tin foil for 10 cents a piece so as not to offend the delicate
sensibilities of the Victorians.

 At same time Minor keith buying banana export companies

 He marries the niece of the President of Costa Rica then teams up with
Boston Fruit Company and form the United Fruit Company and sell 75% of
all bananas to the US. Now, here they basically buy out all of the fruit
suppliers in Central America, to the point where they essentially own all of
Honduras come 1899. They own plantations in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba,
Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama and Santo Domingo In 1901, Guatemala hires
United Fruit to run their postal system. So now they own all of central
America, they are fully intrenched in the governments. As the years go by,
they are paying both governments and rebels alike to maintain their hold
on their land and industry.

Now, let’s stop for a moment, leave Minor Keith there and bring in our friend:
Samuel Zemurray was born in 1892 in Western Russia. A Jewish immigrant who
grew up on a wheat farm in western Russia and was sent to the U.S. alone in his
early teens. He was huge not just for a Jew but for anyone "At the time he was
like 6 feet 3 inches and he was a big, tough guy."

Zemurray saw his first banana in Selma, Ala. He paid a visit to Mobile, where the
big fruit ships came in, and saw piles of bananas thrown aside at the Boston Fruit
Company. When he asked what happened to the bananas in those piles, he was
shocked to learn they were garbage.

If you want to talk about something that'll make you a good salesman, it's a
banana that you have six hours to sell before it rots. "The rule was, if a banana
had one freckle it was called 'a turning' and if it had two freckles it was called 'a
ripe,' and they said you could never get it to the market in time. It would rot,"
Zemurray bought the rotting bananas for next to nothing. "If you want to talk
about something that'll make you a good salesman, it's a banana that you have six
hours to sell before it rots."

Zemurray took those "turning" and "ripe" bananas and rented space on an Illinois
Central Railroad train. The train moved so slowly that the bananas began rotting
along the way. But he worked out a deal with the railroad conductors and the
telegraph guys: They would wire the grocery store owners, who would come and
meet the train.

"He sold the bananas right out of the boxcars," The New York Times said he used
boxcars like a guy on the Lower East Side uses a pushcart." By the late 1890s,
Zemurray was 18 years old — and had made $100,000.

He went down to Honduras and basically he made a deal with all the local officials
— they called them concessions, [but] they were bribes — to not pay taxes and
do all kinds of things we'd be appalled by," He started his own company, Cuyamel,
working a great deal in Honduras.

This motherfucker was NOT playing around. In 1911 his company Cuyamel
supplied weapons to the 1911 coup that brought in a more Cuyamel-friendly
president to Honduras. They have financed guerilla fighters, presidential
campaigns and governments. After fighting United Fruit for years, Cuyamel was
bought by United Fruit for $32 million. But it was just the start for Zemurray, who
became the largest shareholder in the company. In 1932, as the company
struggled, Zemurray became its head and that’s where everything just pumps up
to 11, corruption-wise. He did help them invent refrigerated boats to help the
bananas. But he also created something that we today refer to as:

DUN DUN DUN: THE BANANA REPUBLIC. So the concept of a Banana Republic,
and was first given to Honduras to describe their um…situation….is the concept of
a politically unstable country that is totally economically dependent on 1 specific
crop or industry. It was coined by O’Henry to describe Honduras. It also connotes
a society with a very small ruling class that controls the military and uses/abuses
the poor working class.

They had their hands in overthrowing the president of Guatemala in the 1950s by
convincing the US government that the president was a communist. Any time
workers in any of their countries would attempt to strike, United fruit would pay
soldiers and the military to break the strike by any means necessary.

Here’s something else they did: This enormous company would buy land, build
schools, roads, hospitals for these people and in turn, they would work for the
company. Well, all that was well and good until things like the dreaded Panama
disease, a soil borne fungus would wipe out the area and then the company
would abandon the area, destroy the railroads, and move somewhere else,
leaving the people totally destitute with fungus filled land and nothing else.

In 1924: Dr. Sidney Haas makes it public that bananas are a good cure for children
suffering from celiac disease. United Fruit used this finding to promote banana
consumption in the following decades.

United Fruit subsidiary Fruit Dispatch Company publishes a recipe book

promoting the consumption of bananas with dry cereal, suggesting in particular
corn flakes with bananas and milk. This combination proved to be an incredible
success among consumers. In the following years cereal companies made deals
with United Fruit to advertise this new breakfast. One of them was to include a
coupon for bananas in cereal boxes.

In 1939: United Fruit's Home Economics Department publishes the school teacher
manual entitled "A Study of the Banana: The Everyday Use and Food Value." The
manual gave a detailed description of the food value of bananas and gave
suggestions of preparation. The success of this manual led the company to publish
other school manuals in the following years for elementary to high-school
students.

1944: United Fruit hires cartoonist Dik Browne (the creator of Hagar the Horrible)
to create a cartoon based on the Latin American singer and movie star Carmen
Miranda. The cartoon was baptized as Miss Chiquita Banana and was part of the
advirtisement campaign the company was preparing for when the war was over.

In 1945: the laborors of Guatemala go on strike for poor working conditions of the
banana Plantations. Simultaneously, The character of Miss Chiquita Banana
debuts in the technicolor movie advertisement "Miss Chiquita Banana's Beauty
Treatment" in which she sings to revive an exhausted houwewife.

Between 1955 and 1962 United Fruit published around 15 million pieces of
literature for students in elementary grades through high school to promote the
learning of bananas and the health benefits of their consumption. These manuals
were also distributed in schools around the world United Fruit provided American
school teachers with a package that included student lesson sheets on bananas
and the Central American countries, a folder of banana recipes, a wall chart, a
sound motion picture, a film-strip, and an eight-page teacher's manual on how to
get and use these aids. This educational material was recommended for
geography, history, social studies, health and nutrition, elementary and general
science and biology classes. The kit had a cost of $4.

In 1962: In order to create brand loyalty, United Fruit begins marketing it’s
bananas as Chiquita bananas and creates the individual banana sticker label. The
small blue stickers with the Chiquita logo are affixed to the fruit and the company
makes a strong advertisement campaign to promote the consumption of its
branded banana. To this day these stickers are still put on by hand.

She was depicted as a banana until 1987, when artist Oscar Grillo, creator of the
Pink Panther, transformed her into a woman. The change reflected the image the
public had of Miss Chiquita as a real person.

In 1989: Lindner decides to change the name of the company from United Brands
Company into Chiquita Brands International Incorporated. He justified this by
saying that popular name recognition would help the whole conglomerate.

Twinkies were originally banana flavored

Walmart sells more bananas than any other item
.