Yesterday morning I woke up much
earlier than normal and decided to treat myself to a nice Sodexo style omelet
filled with cheese, onions, and peppers. After enthusiastically indulging the
290-calorie meal Sodexo likes to refer to as an omelet, I grabbed myself a nice
looking Fuji apple and began scavenging through the banana basket, searching,
for the perfect, unharmed yellow crescent moon fruit. Why I feel the need to
get a yellow banana opposed to a yellow and brown or yellow and green banana is
historically based in my past as well as in my distrust for Sodexo food, even a
harmless fruit like a banana.
Since I can remember, my Dad always
had a fresh, cut up piece of fruit in the car while driving my sister and I to
school. While I loved this daily routine, I have now noticed that I have become
very picky about which fruits I choose to eat, as well as what condition said
fruit is in. While looking through the bananas I noticed how many of these
yellow fruits were either inedible or covered in bruises and wondered to myself
where in the world Sodexo was getting these bananas from. With a little
research on my part about the history of the banana I didn’t necessarily find
out where exactly Sodexo was getting their bananas, but I was able to find out
the origin of the banana as well as where I think these bananas are coming
form.
What I learned about the history of
the banana in my research was that, “The earliest documentary reference to bananas in Africa is from
the sixth century A.D. Historians and archaeologists often thought that bananas
were probably introduced to Africa via Madagascar, which was colonized by
people from Southeast Asia in the first millennium A.D.”(Robertshaw) These
facts interested me, yet as I scoured over the Internet I still couldn’t find
where exactly Sodexo was getting their fruit/specifically their bananas.
Although I gave up on the search to find where these bananas were coming from,
just the fact that I couldn’t find the country, continent, region, even
hemisphere where Sodexo was getting their food products, has changed my
relationship, not necessarily with the fruit, but with the Sodexo Company all
together.
Although I am sitting here writing this paper eating a
banana that came from the cafeteria and in about and hour will be going back
downstairs to get a nice Sodexo style meal, the way in which I view the meal
and its components have changed drastically. This distrust that I now have
acquired for the Sodexo Company is not going to force me to stop eating in the
cafeteria or to stop eating all Sodexo productions, yet it has made me more
aware of what is going into my body and the risk factors of such food being
inadequately maintained or prepared. Because of the low risk factors of ill
prepared and maintained fruits and vegetables, I have noticed myself migrating
towards a more vegetarian lifestyle while eating at the cafeteria.
When researching the production the banana, I came across
and interesting source that spoke about the problems of huge supermarkets and
mass distributers wanting evenly ripe bananas and how traditional methods of
ripening the bananas weren’t efficient enough. The author states, “The problem has been that consumers demand
bunches of bananas that have ripened evenly. This was difficult to achieve with
their traditional method of hanging bunches from the kitchen ceiling. So
farmers were unable to supply quality fruit on a regular basis. One farmer,
Juma Mgwane, experimented by putting bunches in an underground pit and using
smoke to hasten ripening.”(Anonymous), which ties back to my essay “Faster”
about how it now seems that the only thing that the food industry cares about
is efficiency. The source goes on to say, “The smoking process takes about 20
minutes. After smoking, the pipe is closed and the pit left for about 24 hours,
when it is opened. The banana bunches are evenly ripened and ready for
packaging and selling.”(Anonymous), instead of waiting for the natural development of
the banana to occur, the farmer chose to speed up the process and in doing so possibly
jeopardized the product, all for the sake of efficiency.
Learning about the banana and its production has
definitely changed my relationship with the food in a subconscious sense, yet I
still love bananas and although there may be some sketchy methods of speeding
of the ripening process, I still have a banana every day. For me, even with
this new information, the benefits of bananas far outweigh the negatives of the
ripening process and mass production. With this in mind, enjoy your next banana
and see if your taste buds can detect the smoky nature of the yellow crescent
shaped fruit.
Sources:
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