List of British apple varieties beginning with the letter C (a partial list). Out of all these varieties (more than 150), the only one for sale in most British supermarkets is Cox’s Orange Pippin.
What is true of bananas is true to a lesser extent of other fruits. There are around six thousand British heritage apple varieties, ranging from tart to sweet, from soft to hard, from yellow to green to red. Yet commercial apple production in the UK now centres around just ten varieties, chosen for a reliable look and shape and a certain bland sweetness. This varietal simplification has consequences for our health. Different apple cultivars contain varying levels of phytochemicals: vitamins that have been linked to the prevention of certain types of cancer and cardiovascular disease. If we only ever eat one type of apple, we may not get the full health benefits of eating the fruit.39
At least with apples, there is still a folk memory of diversity: of the enchanting old varieties that we have lost. This memory is kept alive by farmers’ markets in the autumn. But with bananas, we don’t even expect variety. The Cavendish is an archetypal modern food commodity. Whatever the season, it arrives hygienically zipped in its own biodegradable yellow packaging and it has desirable, healthy overtones. Assuming you get one at the right stage of ripeness, the flavour is as consistent as Coca-Cola. You will find them in the hot summers of Dubai and the freezing winters of Iceland.
Not so long ago, Iceland was a place where fresh fruit was rare. There was a time in the 1930s when Icelanders needed a doctor’s prescription to buy fresh fruit. You can see why Icelandic bananas seemed such a wonderful project to plant biologists of the 1940s. During the early twentieth century, fruit was only available to Icelanders in the summer when there were just three kinds of native berries: regular bilberries (Vaccininum myrtillus), bog bilberries (Vaccininum uliginosum) and crowberries (kroekiber), a type of small black berry growing on sprawling shrubs. The crowberry is mouth-puckeringly sour. Icelandic food writer Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir notes that it would not be considered a delicacy in any country that had access to sweeter tasting berries.
Crowberries used to be one of the inimitable tastes of Iceland, along with moss, seaweed, smoked offal, soured milk (skyr) and salt cod. For centuries, the people on this inhospitable island ate a diet unlike anywhere else in the world, determined by what was available. Grain was nearly impossible to grow and so, instead of a slice of bread, Icelanders sometimes ate dried fish spread with butter.40
In a world before bananas (and all the changes that came with them), Icelanders were people who could appreciate tiny differences in the limited range of ingredients that they ate. In the old days in Iceland, people ate so much cod that they became intensely attuned to the variety of flavours and textures within a single fish, from cheeks to eyeballs. There are 109 words in Icelandic to describe the muscles in a cod’s head.41
The culture that gave rise to this varied language of food has largely gone. Much of the food of Iceland is now the food of everywhere. Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir remembers a time when salt and pepper – and possibly cinnamon, for cakes – were the only spices you could find in Reykjavik. Now, Iceland – despite its cold climate – enjoys extra-virgin olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic in profusion.
Since the 1960s, an ever-increasing range of fruits has been imported into Iceland and there is no need to forage for sour crowberries unless you desperately want to for old times’ sake. A typical Icelander today gets 109 calories a day from fruit, compared with just 46 calories in 1960. At the publishing house where Rögnvaldardóttir now works, a consignment of fresh fruit is delivered to the office every day, about half of it bananas. But in all this variety, she can’t help feeling that something has been lost. ‘As virtually all our fruit is imported, we are rather ignorant of the seasons,’ she comments. Bananas are regarded with affection, she says, because they are relatively affordable and always there in the shops, even in winter. In some fundamental way, Icelanders do not know these new foods as intimately as they once knew cod and crowberries. The average Icelander eats 111 bananas every year. Yet to describe this endless feast of bananas, an Icelander has just one bland word: banani.
I can’t entirely lament the existence of the Cavendish banana, not least because I always have them in my kitchen, ready to feed to a hungry child or to slice onto morning porridge. Without the Cavendish, millions of poorer consumers would have little or no fresh fruit in their diets at all. They are a useful source of potassium, fibre and vitamin B6. But this monoculture of fruit is a symptom of our food culture’s wider obsession with cheapness and abundance over flavour. The salient fact about bananas – one of the most wasted foods in the typical home kitchen – is that there always seem to be too many of them to eat up before they turn brown.
A short history of eating too much
The immense volume of food in our lives is no fluke; it was planned for. In more ways than one, our food system goes back to the aftermath of the Second World War, when governments around the world became obsessed with making sure that their citizens had enough to eat, after the misery of war. In Europe and the US, farmers were paid subsidies for the sheer volume of food that they could produce. We are still living with this legacy of quantity over quality.
Before the war, most farmers had run small mixed farms based on the principle of crop rotation to maintain soil fertility and control pests. After the war, farmers started to specialise, in order to get the maximum yield possible from the land. Nitrogen was diverted from the old bomb factories to make fertiliser and tanks were repurposed as combine harvesters. Under the US Marshall Plan, which ran from 1947 to 1952 to help with post-war reconstruction in Europe, $13 billion was pumped into the economies of the continent. Much of it arrived in the form of animal feed or fertilisers. The era of plenty was beginning.42
One of the paradoxes of the post-war food system was that it entailed the greatest expansion of agriculture the world had ever seen, even as there was a mass exodus of farmers from the land. By 1985, just 3 per cent of the American population were farmers, where a hundred years earlier it had been more than half of the population. But the new farms did not need so many farmers, thanks to huge efficiencies of machinery and fertiliser. Between 1950 and 1990, world output of wheat, corn and cereals more than tripled, with the US leading the way. Something had to be done with all this grain. Increasingly, it was fed to animals to fuel a rising meat market.43
In this revolution of the land, we lost thousands of small farmers. But what we gained was a colossal supply of calories, which after all was exactly what governments had been hoping and planning to achieve after the war. The calories available to the average American increased from 3,100 per day in 1950 to around 3,900 by the year 2000 – around twice as much daily energy as most people need, depending on their activity levels. Put another way, to avoid over-eating in today’s food environment, most of us would need to reject half of our allotted calories. Every day. This is not impossible but nor is it easy, given that it is human nature to eat whatever’s available.44
These changes went along with the increasing dominance of huge multinational food companies who found a way to take the surplus calories and ‘add value’ to them – which meant adding margins. The power accrued by these companies in the decades since the war is hard to overemphasise. By 2012, the revenue of Nestlé alone was $100 billion, twice as much as the GDP of Uganda (at $51 billion). It was these companies, more than the farmers themselves, who profited from the overproduction of subsidised crops in the West. If you break down the US food dollar now, only 10.5 per cent goes to farmers. A much bigger share (15.5 per cent) goes to those processing the food. By itself, the actual raw cereal in a box of cereal is almost worthless. What adds the value are the flavourings and sweeteners and crisping agents, the pictures on the box and the advertisements that make a child clamour for its parents to buy it.45
