[In any socialist future worth living in, an abundance of diverse
foods would replace the tyranny of monoculture.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BANANAS FOR SOCIALISM  
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Arun Gupta
August 25, 2023
Dissent Magazine
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_ In any socialist future worth living in, an abundance of diverse
foods would replace the tyranny of monoculture. _

People carry jute crates filled with bananas at a wholesale fruit
market in Lahore, Pakistan on October 16, 2022. , (Arif Ali/AFP via
Getty Images)

 

Will there be bananas under socialism? The question recently swept the
internet, started with a tweet from Malcolm Harris, communist and
author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the
World. Harris mused that if banana-producing countries became
socialist they would “almost certainly reduce American consumer
access to bananas and that is FINE.”

At New York magazine, Eric Levitz described the ensuing Twitter brawl
as the latest round of a slugfest between pro-growth and degrowth
leftists. Ben Burgis in the Promethean-leaning Jacobin aligned with
pro-growthers when he wrote that “the instinct by at least some
participants in Banana Discourse to trivialize concerns about access
to consumer goods as a matter of spoiled Americans not being able to
imagine giving up their ‘treats’ is deeply misguided.”

Wherever on the banana patch the food fighters imagine they are
planting their flag, they are staking the same claim. Both sides think
shitty capitalist food is all there is. They view socialism solely as
a labor process rather than a social one that would transform
everything from gender and healthcare to cuisine and culture. This
narrow approach leads them to focus on the pitfalls of socialism
instead of the enormous potential it holds for agriculture and food.

A more fruitful approach than asking what socialism can tell us about
bananas is to ask what bananas can tell us about socialism. For one,
it tells us that polyculture is far superior to monoculture in food
systems as well as in politics and society. In any socialist future
worth living in, there would be many more types of bananas available
(and foods in general), and much more diverse methods of farming and
forms of distribution and consumption.

Undoubtedly bananas would exist under socialism—because 400 million
people eat the fruit for up to one-quarter of their daily calories.

 

There are more than 1,000 sweet and savory varieties of bananas, but
the Cavendish cultivar accounts for nearly half of all bananas grown
worldwide and 99 percent of those eaten in America. It is also dull
tasting, a companion to mealy tomatoes, bland strawberries, and watery
carrots. The lifeless fruits and vegetables we find in supermarkets
are the result of capitalist farming that breeds for size, yield,
hardiness, appearance, longevity, and resistance to diseases and
pests—attributes that select against taste. Produce that bursts with
flavor tends to be smaller, more fragile, more perishable, and harder
to store and transport.

As an industrial tomato grower said, “I don’t get paid a single
cent for flavor . . . I get paid for weight.”

Freed from the yoke of Del Monte and Dole, farmers would have little
incentive to cultivate disease-prone clones in plantations up to
30,000 acres big and dependent on human rights abuses, child labor,
and toxic pesticides. (Because the plants are genetically identical, a
single disease or pest can wipe them all out, forcing farmers into a
never-ending chemical arms race with nature.) If farmers were no
longer forced to grow cash crops, they could prioritize feeding
themselves and their communities. Because sustainability would be in
everyone’s interest, they could farm to improve soil and
biodiversity, and reduce carbon emissions as well as the use of
artificial fertilizer and industrial pesticides. Agricultural science
would be for the people, not capital.

More varieties of bananas would be available, because cultivation
would depend on specific growing and social conditions instead of the
tyranny of monoculture. Varietals like red, apple, Lady Finger, Thai,
Blue Java, and Pisang Raja bananas might become as common as the
Cavendish; the more aromatic Gros Michel, which adorned bowls of Corn
Flakes before it was wiped out by a fungus in the mid-twentieth
century, could return.

There would be fewer Cavendish bananas and that is FINE.

Varietals would improve cuisine and taste. Cooks would have more foods
to play with; people could try and compare different bananas. We would
likely eat more plantains, a wonder fruit that is a sibling to other
bananas. When green, plantains are a starchy staple that can be eaten
as salty tostones con mojo de ajo, mashed, mixed with rice, stuffed
with meat, fermented into beer, fried into discs (patacones) that act
as sandwich bread, or served in stews, soups, and the glorious
hangover cure, mofongo. Fried ripe plantains are a divine dessert. The
long-gone National Cafe in the East Village would deep-fry a whole
plantain to a dark golden brown until a fork could slice right through
its caramelized exterior to its custardy innards. Even the skins are
edible. My mother boils green plantains whole, turning the fruit into
a sabzi and slicing the skins into ribbons sauteed for a spicy crisp
masala.

 

Bananas are super cheap—Trader Joe’s has sold them for 19 cents
each since the 1990s—thanks to super-exploitation of labor. In
Ecuador, ten-year-olds work for no money so that their parents’ pay
isn’t docked.

Socialism would end this exploitation not magically, but as part of an
evolutionary process. Take India, the top producer of bananas in the
world at 35 million tons a year. The 572,000 banana workers there earn
$90 a month on average, little more than half of the living rural wage
in India. If they received an additional $180 a month to improve their
wages, as well as better sanitation, housing, clean water and energy,
healthcare, and education, it would add less than a penny per banana
in increased cost.

And it’s not just bananas; many more species and varieties of fruit
would flourish. Under socialism, farmers would have the freedom to
work with the environment instead of colonizing it with alien plants.
We can glimpse such a future in agroforestry, an ancient practice of
cultivating forested gardens to provide food, clothing fibers,
building goods, medicines, and space for livestock.

In New Guinea, where agroforestry practices go back at least 4,000
years, forest gardening maximizes use of surface and vertical space.
Tubers are layered in the earth with yams the deepest, cassava above
them, and taro and sweet potatoes near the surface. A mat of edible
sweet potato leaves and taro leaves covers the soil, and above them
stand hibiscus, sugarcane, and banana fronds. The food forest protects
thin tropical soil, deters insect pests, and makes efficient use of
sunlight.

Agroforestry can be highly productive. Counter to what some
pro-growthers claim, we don’t need chemically intensive industrial
agriculture to feed Earth’s 8 billion people. Farmers in Malawi
using fertilizer trees, which fix nitrogen in the soil, nearly
quadrupled maize yields over fields that used neither trees nor the
mineral fertilizer that burns out soil.

From Bangladesh to Brazil, agroforestry farmers who grow bananas also
cultivate a variety of goods to feed, clothe, and house themselves.
They trade and sell their surplus. In this manner, agroforestry looks
a lot like the Marxist ideal of “producers for themselves.”

 

People care little about bananas compared to coffee and tea, wine and
whiskey, chocolate and spices. Marxists would be the first to revolt
against socialism if deprived of these quotidian stimulants.

Even if socialist farming produces more bananas than before, there is
still the problem of how they—along with other commodities—will
reach workers in North America. The pro-growth crowd is right that
socialists should embrace the development of very low-carbon seaborne
and rail transport that can keep the sinews of international exchange
robust.

Nonetheless, pro-growthers like Burgis are simply wrong. Spoiled
Americans do have to give up some treats, like snarfing almost sixty
pounds of beef a year, owning three cars, and living in
resource-intensive McMansions. Not giving them up means class war on
the rest of humanity; it is impossible for everyone to consume like
Americans.

However, de-growthers who want to largely replace trade for local
production ironically align with wealthy foodies. Local, seasonal, and
organic food may be gourmet virtues now, but until a few decades ago
they were a curse for humanity. Eating what grew near you, in season,
and without modern agriculture and supply chains meant monotony at
best and hunger at worst.

As late as 1900, a century after the Industrial Revolution began,
culinary monotony was the rule the world over. The French averaged
one-and-a-third pounds of bread a day. Black and white sharecroppers
in the South survived on the 3 “Ms”—meal (cornmeal), molasses,
and meat (pork fatback)—for nearly every meal every day. Male
Japanese farmers ate two pounds of rice a day. Trade, mechanization,
and refrigeration ended monotony.

Socialism cannot mean a return to that dismal past. Saying we will
have fewer bananas, as Harris does, is to endorse austerity. The bunch
of banana debaters suffers from a failure of the radical imagination.
If a socialist society decided it wanted foods it did not grow, we can
easily imagine how it might happen. Perhaps the People’s Soviets of
Greater New York would offer doctors, computer technology, or wind
power to the Central American League of Revolutionary Campesinos for
bananas, coffee, cacao, and avocados.

Socialism is not just about goods, however. Two other forms of trade
have existed since the dawn of humans: ideas and people. Today, ideas
are intellectual property, and migrants are largely criminalized. In a
socialist world we would trade cultures, customs, and cuisines. More
important, food wouldn’t only come to us—we would go to the food.

Socialism would allow us to freely roam the world at a human pace—by
biking and walking, on trains and ships—for months or years at a
time. Cuisines are complex symbolic languages that we eat, and you
have to be integrated into cultures and taught how to appreciate
them—just like learning a language. It’s not bucket-list tourism,
the ultimate capitalist banality, where Americans imagine they can
learn a new culture from the comfort of a tour bus in a few days.

Food is a revelation when you travel. Compared to imports found in
America, bananas, mangos, guava, and papaya in India are like the sun
is to the moon. In Mexico, avocados, cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes
grown thirty miles away are tastier and more luscious than the
versions that journey 3,000 miles to our supermarkets.

Instead of hankering for poor imitations, we might rediscover regional
dishes like the broiled Missouri partridges, apple dumplings “with
real cream,” Baltimore canvasback duck, green corn with butter, and
Boston bacon with beans, which Mark Twain lovingly described when he
was homesick while touring Europe. Or we may decide Cavendish bananas
are not as tasty as forgotten North American fruits like mulberries,
paw-paw, huckleberries, and persimmons.

We should conceive of socialism as a world that allows for the full
variety of human experiences and pleasures. And leave the bland
bananas for the capitalists.

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Arun Gupta is an investigative reporter who has written for the
Guardian, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, The Washington Post, and
other publications. He is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute,
cooked professionally in New York City, and is author of the
forthcoming, Apocalypse Chow: A Junk-Food Loving Chef Explains How
America Created the Most Revolutionary Food System in History (The New
Press). Read all of Arun’s writings on Substack, and email him at
[email protected] with question, comments, or to join a food
tour.

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