I love artificial banana flavor. I enjoyed Runts candy when I was a kid, and I still enjoy yellow Laffy Taffy from time to time. Something about its bright color and vibrant flavor stands out to me. But I understand why some people don’t like it. I mean, it doesn’t even taste like a banana, or does it?
The bananas we see in the grocery store are called Cavendish. Although artificial Cavendish flavor exists, the bold flavor from our childhood is still the most common banana flavor. The artificial banana flavor that doesn’t seem banana-like to us is meant to taste like a Gros Michel banana, a fruit that was the standard banana until the 1950s.
The Gros Michel, or Big Mike, was widely popular in the United States from the late 1800s until its disappearance. Sweet, creamy, and cheap, it was widely consumed. However, it went through frequent periods of unavailability, which was immortalized in the 1922 swing jazz song “Yes! We Have No Bananas.”
You’ve seen the seeds of a Cavendish banana; they are those tiny specks you see when you slice one open. Just like Gros Michels, Cavendish bananas were bred to have small seeds so they could be eaten easily. Breeders were cloning their crops and didn’t need them to have seeds anyway. Cloning was faster and more cost-effective, but it left the crop vulnerable to infection. Without the ability to gain immunity through reproduction, the cloned Gros Michel went through periods of unavailability until it eventually disappeared from grocery store shelves entirely. Now, you can only order Big Mikes online as an expensive novelty.
Looking at the current state of things doesn’t give us the whole picture. To understand things as they are now, we must also understand how they came to be. To understand something as simple as the flavor of a banana—or as complex as a human being—we need to consider the many other aspects that intersect with it. But with so many ways to approach a subject, how can we determine which points of intersection are important?
We need to identify the chief determining factor in an individual’s life; only then will we have a starting point for studying a subject. What determines the matter of life someone lives is their relationship to the means of production.
In ancient Rome, you could have been a slave—someone who was owned and treated as property—or someone who neither owned slaves nor was a slave. Or you could have been a slave owner who had control over other people. Obviously, the slave owner had the most power, having de facto control over a person’s life and economic power by controlling someone else’s labor for their benefit.
Under a feudal economic system, you could be a serf condemned to stay on land owned by a lord but who had far greater freedom than a slave. Or you could be neither serf nor lord and have no say over most of the land and its use. Obviously, the feudal lord who owned land and controlled the production on that land had the most power.
How much time we have to live our lives is determined by our relationship with production. Do we have to participate in production on behalf of another person? Do we work for ourselves, or do we sit back while others do the work for us? Do we produce medicine and consumer goods to be enjoyed, or do we have to produce bananas because the country that invaded us wants bananas? When we apply dialectical materialism to history, it becomes clear that studying production and people’s relation to it is the correct way to understand history. This is called historical materialism and leads to some profound conclusions. Production and its development over time have distinct features that must be understood before history can be understood, and therefore before anything in the present zeitgeist can be understood.
First, production never stays still for very long; it is always fluctuating. These changes in production are what cause changes in individuals’ lives. Changes in the mode of production cause the greatest leaps in the manner of life people live. A worker under capitalism is better off than a serf, both because of their personal freedom and because capitalism produces more life-improving commodities. I’ll take air conditioning and refrigerators over a medieval farm any day of the week.
Second, whenever labor combines with capital to produce something, it is called a productive force. Changes in the development of production always begin with changes in productive forces. The Industrial Revolution happened because workers began working in factories, starting a feedback loop where more factories were built, further incentivizing workers to leave rural farms for industrial work, which in turn incentivized the creation of more factories.
Third, new productive forces do not develop separately from old ones. While capitalists seized more and more private property, feudal lords controlled less and less until disappearing as a class altogether. Individuals cannot predict when the next qualitative change in development will happen.
When a plantation owner grows a crop by cloning, they are only thinking about lightening their load and making more capital. They cannot foresee that this will lead to major crop failures and have such a societal impact that people will write songs about it. They cannot predict that this will lead to a change in production and leave an impact on society so great it is still felt a century later.
Artificial banana flavor contains isoamyl acetate, a chemical also found in Gros Michel bananas. Isoamyl acetate gives it that distinct taste I can only describe as “yellow”. But how did the banana we grew up on come to be so different from this older banana? Before we can understand artificial banana flavor, we first need to understand the history of banana production.
The land where Gros Michels were grown was mostly owned by businesses from the United States. The workers who produced the bananas did not own the land, harvesting equipment, or transportation. Corporations like United Fruit bribed politicians and used paramilitary groups to suppress any attempts by the workers to improve their conditions. They worked seven days a week for little money. These were typical conditions in Banana Republics, where fruit companies owned massive amounts of land and resources in small countries, and the inhabitants didn’t have ownership over their own homes.
United Fruit would even convince the U.S. government to invade countries on their behalf. The military would brutally invade and crush all opposition while leaving the real criminals—the wealthy landowners—unharmed. Countries like Costa Rica, Colombia, and Guatemala, just to name a few, were routinely subjected to horrible conditions imposed on them by their northern neighbors. Big Mikes could be so cheap and accessible because the workers producing them were being exploited. “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is about crop failures, but it is also about worker strikes that would halt banana production and shipping. Strikes were common and one of the only ways workers could bargain for better working conditions.
Despite corporations’ best efforts, they were and are still unable to maintain a constant state of banana production. This is because production, by its very nature, is constantly changing. Those changes start with labor’s use of the means of production. Either there was no crop, or workers were striking and withholding their labor. While capitalists currently dictate production, laborers organize and fight for control over it. Every strike or protest, every action the working class takes together, is one step closer to change. Elements of socialism exist all around us, silently building up, waiting for enough quantitative changes to make the next major leap in production. Labor has always been at odds with those who owned the land they worked on. This is what Karl Marx had in mind when he said, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
Isoamyl acetate has been so simple to produce that it has been used as an artificial flavor since the 1800s. Complicated flavors that taste realistic are available, but something so simple that it was used 100 years before I was born is just easier to make. Just like with real bananas, those who own flavor production want as little investment as possible with as much yield as possible. They don’t care if their banana flavor doesn’t taste like any banana, you’ve ever had; it’s cost-effective to produce, so that’s what they produce.
Only by studying banana flavor through historical materialism, by examining its production and relationship with labor, can we understand why Gros Michels left such a cultural impact and why their flavor is still used today. Every single subject has this much history behind it. Every subject is interconnecting with adjacent subjects and always comes back to production and labor’s struggle against those who own production.
The number one thing determining our lives is our relationship with production. If we didn’t have to spend so much time at work, we could study whatever subjects we wanted. If we received the full value of our labor, we could afford the healthcare we need or travel to see the places we’ve always wanted to visit. When we take an active role in our work instead of working for someone else, we find that work more satisfying. The next time you hear about a strike or a protest, remember that those are forces leading to change, and we can see them building up right before our very eyes. The next time you see a banana, remember that banana is the result of the struggle between labor and capital, the same struggle that determines the manner of life we all live.
Additional reading on historical materialism: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
