I posted this almost a year ago as a way of thinking about the food we eat because we supermarket shoppes often take the food we buy for granted.
7th February 2021
Are we bananas? A banana republic. Bananas get associated with far more than just being a fruit. Bananas are a common fruit in first world countries and probably most of us don’t give them a second thought. They are available all year round because we as supermarket shoppers have very little memory of seasonality. We go, we buy bananas because we want to eat bananas. If you are vegan of vegetarian than they are part of a non meat diet. However, what’s the story behind this fruit that is available all year round to us privileged consumers? The same of course could be said for many other products on our shelves but let’s concentrate on this one.
Bananas are taken for granted but they didn’t arrive in England, or at least London, I think until 1633. I’ll have to check that. So in those days they would have been an exotic specialist food and not distributed widely to the general society of 17th century England. That being said they wouldn’t have generated climate change like the bananas we eat today are doing. Like all food produce from far away lands at this current time fossil fuels used in their transportation are causing massive problems. I wonder what percentage of fruit in the 17th century would have made it to being eaten compared to those bananas being transported today? We buy and dispose of bananas without much thought because they are cheap for many of us but their cost in terms of changing or even damaging the environment, depending on which way you look at it is very high.
So let’s look at the global picture because not everyone gets to eat bananas but what if many more people wanted to eat bananas?. Would they remain unavailable as they were to many inhabitants of 17th century England? How much land would need to be cultivated to satisfy the number of people who wanted to eat bananas. Can the Earth support that number of people who want to eat bananas? There you have it. Look at all the food you eat and ask yourself how many humans can the Earth support given our supermarket levels of consumption? We cannot expect other humans, countless numbers of them, to exist on subsistence farming, while we eat exotic bananas. Something has to change.
Our links
Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton clothes and bags, https://junagarh-media.teemill.com/.
My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.
This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.
Our Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JunagarhMedia.
We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.
Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.
Paul Noël 