Читать книгу The Way We Eat Now - Би Уилсон, Bee Wilson, Bee Wilson - Страница 13

The unlikeliest bananas in the world grow in Iceland, a couple of hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. Iceland is not, to put it mildly, an obvious location in which to grow tropical fruit. Winter days in this part of Scandinavia sometimes have just four hours of sunlight and temperatures regularly drop below freezing. But near the city of Hveragerði in the south of the country there is a lava field that produces enough geothermal heat to power greenhouses where Nordic bananas grow.³³

Home-grown Icelandic bananas are a magical proposition, one which seems to buck the trend for increasingly global, faceless modern food. Around the turn of the millennium, rumours circulated that Iceland had become ‘the largest banana republic in Europe’. Others spoke of Iceland attempting to become self-sufficient in the yellow-skinned soft fruits.³⁴

Sadly, the ‘mythical banana kingdom of Iceland’ turned out to be just that, a myth. Bananas may grow in Iceland – a fact which is amazing enough in itself – but that does not mean that they can be grown on a commercial scale. Back in the 1940s, when plant scientists first discovered that bananas could be grown in Iceland, there were experiments with banana farms all over the country, but they were never profitable. The growing season for Icelandic bananas is short, with harvests lasting only from April to June. Soon, the Icelandic banana entrepreneurs gave up and donated their remaining plants to the Agricultural University at Hveragerði. You won’t find a geothermal banana in any local shop because the university is a publicly funded body that is not allowed to sell anything for profit. The tiny crop of bananas produced each year – about a ton – are enjoyed as a free perk by teachers, students and visitors.³⁵

For the rest of their banana needs, Icelanders do exactly the same as people in all northern and western countries: they buy Cavendish bananas shipped in abundance from sunnier countries by a large multinational corporation. Most of the bananas in Icelandic supermarkets – and there are plenty of them – have the blue Chiquita label depicting a glamorous woman wearing a fruit-decorated Carmen Miranda hat (‘Miss Chiquita’). An American firm based in North Carolina, Chiquita is one of the largest global fruit brands, operating in seventy countries, selling bananas produced in South and Central America, with a large concentration coming from Guatemala and Mexico. So far from being a banana outlier, Iceland is in fact entirely typical in the way that it consumes bananas.

Banana bread is currently one of the most-eaten cakes in Reykjavik and modern Icelanders are also enthusiastic consumers of raw bananas eaten out of the hand to gain a quick boost of energy. By 2000, according to FAO data, Iceland imported 12.46 kilos of bananas per head, nearly four times as many as Russia.³⁶

Bananas are a quintessential modern food in that they are overwhelmingly grown in tropical regions but eaten in temperate regions. Bananas are grown in developing countries for the pleasure and nutrition of developed nations. Our dependence on bananas reflects the astonishing fact that it has become more common to eat foods grown from foreign crops than from your own country.

Those yellow fruits, once rare and specific to certain places, are now an ordinary presence in kitchens across the world, a foreign taste that is no longer foreign. To our grandparents, unless they lived in the tropics, the banana was exotic, a huge and unusual treat. Now, there’s nothing unusual or exotic about bananas, which tend to be the cheapest fruit in the supermarket.

Bananas have become an everyday food in Italy and Oman, in Germany and India. Wherever in the world you eat a banana, it is likely to be the same bland Cavendish variety which dominates the world export trade, even though they never taste very good. Cavendish account for 47 per cent of all bananas grown (and close to 100 per cent of all bananas eaten in China and the UK).

For a long time I was puzzled by bananas. Sometimes British people of the wartime generation would speak of how desperately they missed bananas during the war and how they yearned to eat these special fruits again when the war was over. I couldn’t fathom this because the Cavendish banana is nothing to crave. But the bananas of the wartime generation were different. Before the Cavendish, the dominant banana was the Gros Michel, which was said to taste much better. It was a rare example of an old fruit that was sweeter than modern produce; and not just sweeter, but creamier in texture, with a deep, winey and complex flavour. If you’ve ever eaten a banana-flavoured sweet – that deep, sweetly pungent aroma – it’s apparently much closer to the Gros Michel than to the Cavendish. The problem was that the Gros Michel was wiped out by Panama disease in the 1950s.³⁷

When casting around for a new strain of bananas that consumers would accept, the United Fruit Company, the American-owned company that controlled most of the world’s banana plantations, alighted on the Cavendish. It tasted nothing like the Gros Michel – growers at United Fruits noticed that the flavour was off and the texture was dry – but it looked the same, it transported easily and, crucially, it was resistant to Panama disease. Without having much to recommend it in terms of flavour or texture, the Cavendish became the banana to conquer the world, largely because it looked the way people expected a banana to look. (At the time of writing, the Cavendish has been hit by a new strain of Panama disease, which casts yet more doubt on the wisdom of the banana industry investing so heavily in just one strain.)³⁸

As a fruit engineered to be seedless, every Cavendish banana you buy is an exact genetic clone of every other banana. Bananas are the monoculture of all monocultures. There are more than a hundred varieties of bananas in existence – including red-skinned ones – but you wouldn’t know it from the selection on offer in most shops, where bananas come in just one variety. Except for plantain-eaters who eat them in cooked form, you seldom hear anyone talk about the virtues of different varieties of banana because the whole point is that you expect them to taste the same: not the most delicious thing you ever ate, but cheap, filling and fairly wholesome – compared to a bar of chocolate if not to other fruit. Bananas in the supermarket are mainly marketed not on variety or flavour but on size: small ‘child-sized’ bananas, larger ones for the rest of us.

Cabusse	Caroline
Cacanska Pozna	Caroline Hopkins
Cagarlaou	Carrara Brusca
Calville Blanc d’Hiver	Carrata
Calville d’Aout	Carrey
Calville d’Oullins	Carswell’s Honeydew
Calville d’Ulzen	Carswell’s Orange
Calville de Doue	Cartaut
Calville de Maussion	Carter’s Blue
Calville de Saint-Sauveur	Carter’s Pearmain
Calville des Femmes	Case Wealthy
Calville des Prairies	Castle Major
Calville Duquesne	Catherine (M27)
Calville Malingre	Catshead
Calville Rouge d’Automne (Barnes)	Caudal Market
Calville Rouge d’Hiver	Cavallotta
Calville Rouge du Mont d’Or	Ceeval
Cambusnethan Pippin	Cellini
Camelot	Celt
Campanino	Chad’s Favourite
Canada Blanc de la Creuse	Champ-Gaillard
Canvada	Channel Beauty
Captain Kidd	Chantecler
Caravel	Chantegrise
Cardinal (INRA)	Charden
Carlisle Codlin (of Bultitude)	Charles Eyre
Carlton	Charles Ross (LA 69A)
Carmingnolle	Charlot
Carnet	Charlotte
Caroli d’Italie	Chataignier

List of British apple varieties beginning with the letter C (a partial list). Out of all these varieties (more than 150), the only one for sale in most British supermarkets is Cox’s Orange Pippin.

What is true of bananas is true to a lesser extent of other fruits. There are around six thousand British heritage apple varieties, ranging from tart to sweet, from soft to hard, from yellow to green to red. Yet commercial apple production in the UK now centres around just ten varieties, chosen for a reliable look and shape and a certain bland sweetness. This varietal simplification has consequences for our health. Different apple cultivars contain varying levels of phytochemicals: vitamins that have been linked to the prevention of certain types of cancer and cardiovascular disease. If we only ever eat one type of apple, we may not get the full health benefits of eating the fruit.³⁹

At least with apples, there is still a folk memory of diversity: of the enchanting old varieties that we have lost. This memory is kept alive by farmers’ markets in the autumn. But with bananas, we don’t even expect variety. The Cavendish is an archetypal modern food commodity. Whatever the season, it arrives hygienically zipped in its own biodegradable yellow packaging and it has desirable, healthy overtones. Assuming you get one at the right stage of ripeness, the flavour is as consistent as Coca-Cola. You will find them in the hot summers of Dubai and the freezing winters of Iceland.

Not so long ago, Iceland was a place where fresh fruit was rare. There was a time in the 1930s when Icelanders needed a doctor’s prescription to buy fresh fruit. You can see why Icelandic bananas seemed such a wonderful project to plant biologists of the 1940s. During the early twentieth century, fruit was only available to Icelanders in the summer when there were just three kinds of native berries: regular bilberries (Vaccininum myrtillus), bog bilberries (Vaccininum uliginosum) and crowberries (kroekiber), a type of small black berry growing on sprawling shrubs. The crowberry is mouth-puckeringly sour. Icelandic food writer Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir notes that it would not be considered a delicacy in any country that had access to sweeter tasting berries.

Crowberries used to be one of the inimitable tastes of Iceland, along with moss, seaweed, smoked offal, soured milk (skyr) and salt cod. For centuries, the people on this inhospitable island ate a diet unlike anywhere else in the world, determined by what was available. Grain was nearly impossible to grow and so, instead of a slice of bread, Icelanders sometimes ate dried fish spread with butter.⁴⁰

In a world before bananas (and all the changes that came with them), Icelanders were people who could appreciate tiny differences in the limited range of ingredients that they ate. In the old days in Iceland, people ate so much cod that they became intensely attuned to the variety of flavours and textures within a single fish, from cheeks to eyeballs. There are 109 words in Icelandic to describe the muscles in a cod’s head.⁴¹

The culture that gave rise to this varied language of food has largely gone. Much of the food of Iceland is now the food of everywhere. Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir remembers a time when salt and pepper – and possibly cinnamon, for cakes – were the only spices you could find in Reykjavik. Now, Iceland – despite its cold climate – enjoys extra-virgin olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic in profusion.

Since the 1960s, an ever-increasing range of fruits has been imported into Iceland and there is no need to forage for sour crowberries unless you desperately want to for old times’ sake. A typical Icelander today gets 109 calories a day from fruit, compared with just 46 calories in 1960. At the publishing house where Rögnvaldardóttir now works, a consignment of fresh fruit is delivered to the office every day, about half of it bananas. But in all this variety, she can’t help feeling that something has been lost. ‘As virtually all our fruit is imported, we are rather ignorant of the seasons,’ she comments. Bananas are regarded with affection, she says, because they are relatively affordable and always there in the shops, even in winter. In some fundamental way, Icelanders do not know these new foods as intimately as they once knew cod and crowberries. The average Icelander eats 111 bananas every year. Yet to describe this endless feast of bananas, an Icelander has just one bland word: banani.

I can’t entirely lament the existence of the Cavendish banana, not least because I always have them in my kitchen, ready to feed to a hungry child or to slice onto morning porridge. Without the Cavendish, millions of poorer consumers would have little or no fresh fruit in their diets at all. They are a useful source of potassium, fibre and vitamin B6. But this monoculture of fruit is a symptom of our food culture’s wider obsession with cheapness and abundance over flavour. The salient fact about bananas – one of the most wasted foods in the typical home kitchen – is that there always seem to be too many of them to eat up before they turn brown.