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The Great Banana Scramble of 1899
B ananas : T he F astest -T raveling F ruit Inside the Great Banana Scramble of 1899
Is any bowl of oatmeal complete without bananas? What about a hotel breakfast? Or three scoops of ice cream lined up in a row? Here in America, the answer is no. Bananas are as ubiquitous as they are quirky — but how did they get that way? UNITED FRUIT’S BANANA EMPIRE Once upon a time, there lived a man called the “Banana King.” Actually, it wasn’t once upon a time: It was 1890 in Limón, Costa Rica, and the man’s name was Minor Cooper Keith. Keith traveled to Central America to build railroads, but when he planted 800,000 acres of bananas to feed his workers, he ended up in the banana business, too. In 1899, he co-founded United Fruit.
WARP SPEED BANANAS Two secrets helped Keith’s bananas cross the 7,175 miles from Limón to Seattle in under seven days. The first was the railroad, which United Fruit operated. Railroad cars sped the bananas from their plantations to the Port of Limón. There, they were loaded onto the second secret: the first-ever refrigerated ships. Those ships steamed north, where their precious cargo was unloaded, stacked into yet more United Fruit railroad cars, and dispatched across the U.S. to Seattle at warp speed. This mad scramble of plantation workers, conductors, and captains brought us the plethora of bananas we have today. THE NEXT BANANA BATTLE
Back then, the U.S. market for bananas was in its infancy. Keith wanted to change that, but one huge obstacle stood in his way. THE PROBLEM OF PERISHABILITY
United Fruit is still pulling the levers of the banana machine today under the name Chiquita. But now the company is facing another hurdle. Our everyday banana — the
Cavendish — is under threat from a disease that could cause it to disappear from the breakfast table for good. To find out more about the banana crisis, head to Wired.com and dive into Rob Dunn’s story “Humans Made the Banana Perfect — But Soon, It’ll Be Gone.”
Keith’s conundrum was this: How could he get his bananas to American breakfast tables before they went bad? He had to find a way to transport them from Costa Rica to U.S. supermarkets in less than seven days — with only early 1900s technology! To do it, United Fruit came up with something brand new.
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