His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.īeginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S.

From this was born the Chiquita-branded banana and today's quality standard of fruit that is uniform in shape and color.

Winner, George Perkins Marsh Award for Best Book in Environmental History, American Society for Environmental History, 2007īananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, 'banana republics,' and Banana Republic clothing stores-everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. As Soluri shows, introduction of the Cavendish radically altered banana production and required a major marketing campaign to ensure its acceptance in the U.S.

John soluri banana cultures