We have no bananas. That's Louis Prima singing the novelty song Yes we have No Bananas in nine. The song was actually written in a century ago and was so popular a million copies of its sheet music sold in a matter of months. As Variety wrote, its success is unexplainable, although the title as a catch line may be a cause we have no bananas today. That title came from a phrase supposedly uttered by a Greek grocer at a Long Island fruit stand. Some believe the song was inspired by an actual banana shortage. Regardless, the song was such a craze that demand for the fruit skyrocketed, causing a well runs on bananas and now. It might surprise you that the banana that everyone was going eight four at the time was not the banana you find at your local grocery store today. This was an entirely different variety of banana, one that dominated the US market for decades in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Its name the grow Michell French for big Mike. For many, this was the only banana they would ever know, and it was delicious, has a nicer taste and more banana eat taste. It is better than the banana we eat now. When the grow Michelle had to be replaced, banana companies weren't sure the new banana, the one we eat today, which is known as the Caven dish, would even be accepted. When the switch had to happen, they were like, no housewife is going to buy these because they just don't taste as good. So what happened to this loved banana We'll explain, and along the way take a look back at some other forgotten foods, and I'll chat with Broadway legend Andre de Shields about his special banana memories. And that's what you want for it to be. You wanted to change your default consciousness. Otherwise why eat it? And yes there will be singing. We've strink beans and onions and big juicy lemon and all sorts of fruit, and say from CBS Sunday morning, and I heart I'm Morocca. And this is mobituaries, this moment, the groomy shell death of a banana. Ah, the sound of mourning. Actually it's this sound that means morning to me, The dulcet tones of frozen bananas getting ground up. That's pretty much the only way I consume bananas these days in a blender with some other ingredients. To me, a banana is simply a potassium delivery system, too boring to eat on its own, which is why I was fascinated to learn that this wasn't always the case. That my grandparents enjoyed much better bananas. So how did we get here to these blah banas. I never intended to be sort of the world expert on any particular topic, let alone bananas, but I have come to um not just accepted, but embrace it. That's Dan Capell, the author of Banana, The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. He's researched and traveled the world, learning everything there is to know about bananas. Bananas were the very first cultivated fruit, and so we're talking ten thousand or more years that bananas have been part of the human diet and the human story. Actually, but in terms of bananas being available to people who don't live in places where bananas can grow, um, that's less than a hundred fifty years. The earliest bananas grew in the wild in Southeast Asia and then spread to other parts of the world. Spanish and Portuguese explorers and missionaries brought bananas to the New World in the fifteen hundreds, where the fruit would flourish in the Caribbean and Central America. The banana made its splashy US debut at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in eighteen seventy six. The event marking the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence introduced it's nearly ten mill the visitors to all sorts of innovations. Heinz Ketchup, a steam powered monorail, a suitcase that turned into a bathtub really, and Alexander Graham Bell's invention of a little something called the telephone, which is funny because as a child, I'm sure I tried to talk into a banana. But the banana plant in the exhibitions Horticultural Hall was reportedly such a sensation that a guard had to be put on lookout to prevent visitors from trying to grab a souvenir. Had people seen pictures of it before or did it just come as this surprise, this thing from almost like outer space. I think that exhibition probably made the banana more real to people. These exhibitions captured people's imaginations especially the imaginations of some entrepreneurs who then started looking at ways to bring bananas to the US. Those entrepreneurs began scouting tropical regions where bananas flourished, and while there were a number of rieties to choose from, sellers seized on the gromy shell banana, first grown on the Caribbean island of Martinique in the eighteen thirties. That in Jamaica, the groomy shell had spread throughout the Caribbean and Central America, and it became top banana in the US largely for one reason. The most important thing is that it's going to survive shipping. If dozens of us shipping, nothing else matters. And the grower shell survives shipping better than any other banana because of its tough skin and and it's slow ripening characteristics. And so that was the one that they were going to make their money on. Another benefit, every banana in the bunch or finger in the hand, if we're using proper terminology here, was exactly the same. Okay, quick banana biology lesson. You've probably noticed that the bananas you eat don't have seeds, those little black circles you might see. Our vestigial seeds remnants of an early species of banana. No seeds means bananas reproduce by a transplanting a piece of one plant, known as a sucker, to start growing another. They're basically clones. This means that most every banana we eat is genetically identical, tasting exactly the same, but also equally vulnerable. With every major company growing and selling the groomy shell and only the grow michell, the banana industry established what's called a monoculture, growing only one variety of a single crop. It would prove to be a dangerous gambit. After settling on the growny shell, the entrepreneurs needed to figure out how to bring these bananas in mass quantities to the United States. One of the first major companies to figure this out was the United Fruit, which would later become Chiquita. The company devised and innovative solution refrigerated shipping. This is not in the days of ubiquitous refrigeration. These banana ships had ice in them, tons and tons of ice that were put in these colds, and there were these elaborate ventilation systems into the cargo holes that would direct the cold towards them. The ships were painted white to keep them cool. Those refrigerated ships, each of which could carry up to a half million bananas, would become known as the Great White Fleet, eventually the largest private navy in the world. But there were still a few hurdles for the banana business, namely getting consumers to accept the product. For many of the prim and proper women of the Victorian era, eating a banana was simply too risque given the fruits suggestive shape. Many chose to slice or cut up their bananas and hide them in foil. To dispel the notion that banana eating was shameful, postcards were distributed showing perfectly respectable ladies delicately consuming the fruit out in the open. I have a few of them, of the very proper Victorian ladies holding bananas eating bananas. Um, they're weird. How are they? How are they holding them? That's not suggestive. They're holding them like they're at picnics, and you know they're eating them peeled with the peel hanging down on their hands instead of cut up. Um, and they're very proper. As inhibitions faded, that consumer had to be educated. Then they had to be seduced, because they had. I mean, knowing about it isn't enough. You have to want it, And then they had to be taught how to eat them and keep them. The banana was so foreign to so many, including immigrants at Ellis Island who were often given a banana as their first taste of America, that newspapers had to explain how to let them ripen and how to peel them. People also needed to be sold on the health benefits. United Fruit started using innovative tactics like getting doctors to endorse bananas as a great source of nutrition for babies, and after partnering up with another new food on the market, cornfl as, the banana companies helped revolutionize the consumer experience. They came up with what was basically the first supermarket coupon, and the banana companies basically say we're gonna offer a deal. If you buy milk, corn flakes and bananas, you'll get a refund or a coupon for the milk for free. Really smart because the banana companies didn't pay for it. They convinced the milk companies to pay for it. But it was the banana company's idea. It all worked. Bananas went mainstream no longer considered an exotic luxury item. Bananas were everywhere, and they were cheap, becoming known as the poor man's fruit. With ubiquity came good and bad. The good clever inventions like the banana split, just don't ask where it originated. Several towns take credit. And the bad that heskey banana appeal, which was becoming a hazard on city streets. A New York Times article from a TV before notes that a wealthy merchant age seventy five slipped on a banana peel while coming home from church and broke his leg. Quote he is not expected to recover. The creation of the New York City Sanitation Department was absolutely a reaction to the ubiquity of banana peals, and these uniform sanitation men were sent through the city to help solve this hazard. The police were also on the case. In eighteen nineties six, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of the New York City Police Department, warned his men of banana peals and their quote tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement. But rather than slip in popularity, bananas continued on their way to becoming the dominant fruit in America. In the early nineteen hundreds, consumption nearly tripled from fifteen million bunches sold to over forty million, out selling apples and oranges, and by the nineteen twenties, bananas were firmly entrenched in popular culture and even in language. The flapper slang term banana oil translated to nonsense when he tells you, I annoy you that banana oil, and all die for you that banana on. Just a few years later, George and Ira Gershwin would have a hit with but not for Me, using bananas to mean just playing crazy. I never water here from any cheerful Pollyanna, who tells face supplies amazing, it's a banana silent. Film stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin turned that dastardly banana peal into a classic comedy gag, and Yes we have No Bananas even got a sequel song sung here by an exasperated Eddie. Can't hey, hey, no, can take them away? Bananas, and specifically gromy shell bananas. We're here to stay, or so people thought, coming up a gromy shehall taste test with Broadway superstar Andre to Shields. But first, a mobituary tribute to another popular food of the past. It's been called America's forgotten fruit. I'm talking, of course, about the paw paw. Large, oblong and misshapen on the outside, a fruit that only a mother could love. With a custardy flesh and nickel sized seeds on the inside, the papa tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana. Found in at least twenty six states, the paw paw was a staple of many of American diets, a favorite dessert of George Washington, served chilled apparently, and eaten by Lewis and Clark and their men on their expedition. The fruit was even the subject of a song sung here by Burl Lives Whero. Where is dear little Susie Whero? Where is dear little Susie Whero? Where is dear little Susie? We're down under the ball? So why did the papa go bye bye? Much of it has to do with the fact that it ripens quickly and doesn't ship well, so you're not going to find it at the modern day supermarket. You have to forage for it, and really who has the time? Also, it's a little messied beat. New York Times article notes a woman could not eat a pawpaw in front of her lover because quote, the site is disgusting to the point of utter disillusion. Still, papas are out there. You just need to find them. Perhaps they're ripe for a comeback. So you want that to meet the wizard. That's the legendary Andre to Shields playing the Wizard in the Broadway musical The Whiz. Andre has been electrifying audiences for decades. You either got the hell on, Hey, that's Tom Hain't nonibo wad down Town went down under the ground and finally won his first Tony Award for Hades Town in at age seventy three, Baltimore, Maryland. Are you in the house? I am making good on my promise that I would come to New York and become someone you'd be proud to call your native son or Banana is a luxury growing up. I grew up in a food desert. There was hardly anything that was considered produce, and even if it were, it wouldn't have been fresh. You look at it and you think, oh, I shouldn't eat this, but that's the banana that we we're able to buy in our neighborhood. But as he ventured out in the world, Andre became a banana expert of sorts. Banana is more easily peeled if you do it from its black tip as opposed to the green stem. So pull off the black tip and eat it. I've never done that. Then peel the banana. You're not wasting any part of this. But I told you it was serendipitous when you asked Andrea d Ship to come on your podcast and talk about the banana Andre de peals. Back in the nineteen sixties, he even participated in one of the more trippy banana pads. Eat the banana, throw the peels into an oven. Once they're baked, the fiber on the inside becomes a lovely substitute for marijuana. Are you serious, I'm serious. So you you're smoking banana peals. Yeah, not the peel, but the fiber on the inside. Now, Andrea wasn't the only one doing this. A number of newspapers and magazines at the time shared stories on the popular trend, as well as recipes. A smoke to banana peel recipe was featured in the Notorious Anarchist cookbook, and many people also believed that the seven hit song Mellow Yellow was about smoking banana peels netana grace. In fact, the song wasn't about that. What's more, researchers and the FDA would investigate and determine that banana peels had no hallucinogenic properties. But it made for some good stories and probably some fun parties. Regardless. Andre is someone who knows a good banana, and with so many banana variety has grown around the world, he's tasted more than a few in his travels. He told me about a transformative experience he had while touring the United Arab Emirates in It was a banana that kicked but knocked me out. It was intoxicating, and that's what you want fruit to be. You wanted to change your default consciousness. Otherwise why eat it? And when I ate it, it tasted like a solid version of a cream sickle. Okay, like candy almost ice cream, a dessert, a dessert dessert exactly. It made me feel like I needed to repent. It was a guilty pleasure. It was a guilty pleasure, and you know, to have a banana. Do that to you is so surprising. We have become accustomed to a bland, utilitarian banana exactly. The banana that Andre eight in the UAE might well have been a variety similar to the blue java or ice cream banana grown in Asia, Australia and Hawaii, said to have a creamy texture like vanilla ice cream or custard. M m. You see, there are other more exotic varieties of bananas out there. In fact, there are still gromy shell bananas being grown on small lot farms. We acquired some from a specialty grower in Miami for a taste test on this very podcast with Andre to Shields. Would he find it as exciting as legend has it. For the sake of comparison, we started with today's banana of the Cavendish. This is the one you buy at your local supermarket, and exciting it is not. Okay, so we're going to take a bite. I'm ready when you are. This is your traditional taste of a banana that you would slice on to your cereal. There's nothing intense about this flavor. If this banana were a personality, what would that personality be? The one we just tasted the BBC News, the BBC News banana, which is dependable or reliable, But but what devoid of emotion? Right? No razzled asks? And then it was time time to taste the groomy shell. No, here we go, Okay, it's time, it's time. Bla, what do you think? It's a richer taste. It tastes definitely like it's come from the earth. This banana, the gro michell, had a little more maturity to it. It was slightly sexier. I wanted to chew it more slowly. I wanted to roll it around in my mouth. It had a few more tones, earthier, more mature, sexier. Who wouldn't want a gromy shell. People today don't know that they have settled for a lesser banana today. I think people do understand that. But in terms of present day America, that's the deal. You want to take it home. We want to leave it on the counter for a few days. We want to forget about it and then we'll go back. And we wanted to look exactly like it was when we bought it, or we're not going to eat it. Andre To Shields is a performer par excellence. He can sing, he can dance, he can wax poetic about bananas. So at the end of our conversation, I had one final request. I was praying that Tony Emmy and Grammy Award winning Andrea Shields would indulge my desire to sing, yes we have no bananas, a short version of it, indulging, Oh, yes we have no bananas. We have no bananas. Today we've strink beans and onions and big juicy lemon and all sorts of fruit, and say we have an old fashion tomacro how long island potato? But yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas. We've got no bananas. We have no bananas. To dat common hats off the Peggy Lee. Why Peggy Lee? If that's all there is, just keep dancing up. Next the Demise of the Groomy Shell. But first another mobituary tribute toy Forgotten Food. It was nine and NASA was preparing to and the first man to the Moon. Of course, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins would have to eat when they were in space. They couldn't just drink tang, So NASA teamed up with Pillsbury to create some innovative products, one of which was a rod shaped food designed for the astronauts to easily consume in their space suits. Enter the space food stick. With the American public going space crazy, Pillsbury decided to create a commercial version. Today, the United States has engaged in a gigantic effort to send men to the Moon. For this effort, Pillsbury has developed many special foods. Here is the first one to be made available to the public. Marketed as a new idea in snack foods, Space food Sticks came wrapped in shiny foil to give that space age appearance, and perhaps to jazz up the fact that the product kind of looked like a wooden dowl. The sticks came in flavors like chocolate, caramel, and peanut butter. Ads proclaimed that the sticks were only about forty four calories, but they nourish like a major meal. But just two years after space food Sticks hit the market, the novelty had worn off. Pillsbury decided to remove the word space from the name, and consumers seemed even less interested in buying food sticks. The product would eventually be discontinued. Space food Sticks are long gone, but are now hailed as a forerunner to today's energy bars. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for snack food at your grosses next to the instant breakfast section, space food sticks the energy snack from US Aerospace Research and Pillsbury. That's Harry Belafonte singing Dao, also known as the Banana boats song Mr Dali Mandali Di Banan. The tune was adapted from a Jamaican folk song believed to be sung by doc workers in the early nineteen hundreds as they worked overnight to pack bananas onto ships seven foot. While the beloved song is fun to sing, it's ultimately about a serious struggle, one that many people were facing as bananas became big business. The business model of bananas is to sell them for half the price of apples and oranges. That's banana author Dan Capell again. How do they do it? They do it by limiting the costs that they had control over, and those two costs were land and labor. And to get land, they would come up with these deals with Basically, the banana entrepreneurs owned all this land, and then to get labor, they exploited people. There's no other way to put it. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company owned land, employed thousands, and controlled railroads and utilities throughout much of Latin America and the Caribbean. The rapid acquisition of geographical and political control led to the company's nickname El Polpo the octopus. Banana workers became ponds of United Fruit and its competitor, Standard Fruit, later known as Dole. The companies seemed to stop at nothing to get bananas harvested and shipped to the United States. The Central American nations that produced bananas for United Fruit and others became known as banana republics. Yes, I know you might be thinking of that place where you buy khakis, but the origin of the term is far darker. Coined by author oh Henry, it came to mean governments centrally controlled by these banana companies, to the detriment of the people who actually lived there. They would install friendly governments. The workers had no rights. It was tragic and horrible. And this is the paradox of the banana. The fruit that we love so much comes with a very, very bloody cost that is mostly unknown and hidden to the average consumer. Then and now strikes riots and demands for better wages became common, but they were tamped down, often violently. In the Colombian military put an end to a strike in the town of Sienaga by opening fire on demonstrating United Fruit banana workers in what became known as the Banana Massacre, an event that would later be incorporated into the Gabrielle Garcia Marquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The death toll by some instruments was as high as two thousand. Another dramatic intervention happened several decades later, in nineteen fifty four and the form of a coup in Guatemala to oust the democratically elected president Hakabo R Ben's. He has campaigned on banana workers rights. He's been very careful. He has not asked for a lot. He's asked for some basic stuff, increases in pay. He's asked for some land back. But the banana companies can't abide this. And at this point in nine the banana companies are deeply, deeply involved in the United States government, so they have a lot of pole. At the time, United Fruit controlled fort of Guatemala's land, so our Ben's plans for a grarian reform were unacceptable. To the company. United Fruit launched a public relations campaign to convince the US government and the public that our Ben's was a communist and that Guatemala was a Soviet satellite state in the making, that commissioned so called studies on the situation, lobbied newspapers to convey their preferred narrative, and eventually put out a short film entitled why the Kremlin hates Bananas and Therefore the agents of international Communism have selected the United Fruit Company as a prime target of attack. Remember this was the nineteen fifties and the height of the Red Scare, and while Guatemalan President Urbans did have some Communists in his coalition, there was no evidence that he himself was one, much less working in concert with the Soviets. His idol was said to be f d R, and many of his social reforms were patterned after the New Deal. Nonetheless, President Eisenhower was convinced that the R Ben's government posed a threat and authorized the CIA to oust him. A coup was put into motion using radio propaganda, bombing raids, and a small band of Guatemalan exiles and Central American mercenaries. This results in the brutal overthrow of the Guatemalan government and the chaos that comes after that. Once our bands is deposed, he's humiliated, he's stripped, naked, forced to flee to Mexico, and Guatemala never really recovers from that. For forty or fifty years. Meanwhile, on the home front, United Fruit continued to win hearts and minds, providing books and pamphlets to schools on the value of bananas you might call it banana Ganda, and making movies like Journey to Banana Land. Today, fast white steamships travel across the Caribbean with cargoes more valuable than pirates. Gold officers and trim white uniforms pick up their golden cargoes from a place we called Banana Lam. The film goes inside Central American countries where everyone is hard at work but also happy, of course, as bananas are harvested. As the plant bends, the bunch comes down on the shoulder of another man who has called a backer. Each bunch ways from fifte seventy five palms. The United Fruit wanted people to buy their bananas and their bananas only, and a few years earlier had come up with a way to get brand recognition in the form of a certain cartoon character with a memorable tingle. I'm Takita Banana, and I've come to say bananas have to ripen in a certain way, and when they click with brown and have a golden hue, bananas tastes the best and not the best for you. Animated spokes banana, Miss Chiquita was an instant hit. Anyway you want to eat them, it's impossible to beat them. But banana is like the climate of a very very tropical equador. So you should never put bananas in the refriger on sidebar. With all due respect to Miss Chiquita, her parent company now notes it is okay to put bananas in the refrigerator after they've ripened. It'll keep them fresh just a little longer. The animated banana with a bowl of fruit on her head was modeled after a movie star, Carmen Miranda, known as the Brazilian Bombshell, who had shimmied and sombered her way to box office gold in the nineteen forties, at one point becoming the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Are you at there? Why does everybody look at me? And then begin to talk about the Pristmas three, I hope. That means that everyone he's glad to see the Lady and the two footi head. Carmen Miranda played on the stereotype of the fiery, tempered and lustful Latin American woman, but her talent was undeniable. Her lady in the two d fruity hat number in the film, The Gang's All Here is a banana extravaganza as dancers wave giant bananas around. The New York Times review of the film did note that the dance numbers quote seemed to stem straight from Freud. They weren't wrong. Carmen Miranda was inextricably tied to the banana, as she would often remind but don't forget people. I think there was lots of money being made with bananas for Carmen Miranda, United Fruit and others, but time was running out for the groomy shell. Trouble had been brewing since the early nineteen hundreds when bananas in Panama were infected by a fungus so it's named Panama disease. And this fung is not only destroys banana plantations very quickly, but thouls the soil in a way that the bananas cannot grow there pretty much ever again, and remember that banana biology lesson from earlier. The fact that each groomy shell banana was essentially a clone of every other groomy shell banana meant that if one banana were in danger, they all were. When Panama disease first hit, companies tried to outrun it, moving to different fields, starting over. But the disease was spreading fast and thousands of acres of land had to be abandoned. Its spread to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras. So you have this insane situation. Demand is increasing, you need to keep prices low, but land is getting more difficult to find because of this disease. Finally, after decades of battling Panama disease, the banana companies had to face facts. The grow Michelle as a mass market banana was doomed. They needed to find another variety. Changing the whole industry to another banana, which is a huge logistical issue, becomes sort of the worst choice to the sort of hide bound, entrenched banana barons. They don't want to do younger. You wait, it's the only choice, right, right, And so it's doll that begins experimenting with a replacement for the grow michell um and experiments with a whole bunch of them, and Cavendish is one of them. The Cavendish began to replace the grow michell in the late nineteen fifties. Now, as I've made clear, I find the Cavendish to be a boring banana. If you heard our season one episode on sitcom Deaths and Disappearances, you may remember the story of the two Darren's from Bewitched, two actors in the same role, the second one far lesser memorable than the first. You know where this is going. The Cavendish is the second Darren of bananas. There I've said it. It's also smaller than the groomy shell, and it bruises more easily. But it wasn't as susceptible to Panama disease. Would Americans accept this new, lesser banana. There were concerns, but as Dan Capell says, they ultimately didn't matter. Maybe it's the beginning of the age of fast food. Maybe the American palette is not so sophisticated. The transition who went fairly smoothly. I think there were very few people who sort of saw this new banana and recognize it as a new banana, or even taste it and said, you know, this doesn't taste right, It's not as good as the other one. By the nineteen sixties the transition was complete. Big Banana sold their final groomy shells in In the years since, we've all come to tolerate, if not embrace, the caven dish. But the Cavendish itself is also in danger, vulnerable to a number of diseases. And it's entirely possible that, yes, we have no bananas, could become our reality if the cabin dish goes the way of the groomy shell. If you were to eulogize to groomy shell, what might you say? I would say, it's nice to eulogize the growmer shell, and it clearly deserves eulogizing. But are good bananas out there, other bananas that are even better. And the idea that we should just give up and just accept this mediocre banana um and lament the better banana that's lost does not have to be the future of the banana. We can get those great bananas. You're a banana optimist. I am. I am the ultimate Banana Optimists. We leave you now with Broadway superstar Andrea Shields singing the Chaqueta Banana song and Jack the Banana and I'm here to say, but banana on your series like this today you loveth the breakfast or at any time, no matter when you eat it, those bananas tastes fine. We're going to issue that as its own single. I hope you savored this Mobituary. May I ask you to please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Here. All new episodes of Mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts and check out Mobituaries. Great Lives Worth Reliving the New York Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This episode of Mobituaries was produced by Zoe Marcus. Our team of producers also includes Aaron Shrank, Wilcome Martinez Cacceto, and Me Morocca. It was edited by Moral Walls and engineered by Josh Hahn, with fact checking by Katherine Newhan. Our production company is me On Media. Our archival producer is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Indispensable support from Craig Swaggler, Dustin Gerveis, Alan Pang, Reggie Basil, and everyone at CBS News Radio. The Irrefutable Aaron Shrink is our senior producer. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Steve Raise's and Morocco. The series is created by Yours truly and as always, undying thanks to Rand Morrison and John carp for helping breathe life into Mobituaries

We have no bananas. That's Louis Prima singing the novelty song Yes we have No Bananas in nine. The song was actually written in a century ago and was so popular a million copies of its sheet music sold in a matter of months. As Variety wrote, its success is unexplainable, although the title as a catch line may be a cause we have no bananas today. That title came from a phrase supposedly uttered by a Greek grocer at a Long Island fruit stand. Some believe the song was inspired by an actual banana shortage. Regardless, the song was such a craze that demand for the fruit skyrocketed, causing a well runs on bananas and now. It might surprise you that the banana that everyone was going eight four at the time was not the banana you find at your local grocery store today. This was an entirely different variety of banana, one that dominated the US market for decades in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Its name the grow Michell French for big Mike. For many, this was the only banana they would ever know, and it was delicious, has a nicer taste and more banana eat taste. It is better than the banana we eat now. When the grow Michelle had to be replaced, banana companies weren't sure the new banana, the one we eat today, which is known as the Caven dish, would even be accepted. When the switch had to happen, they were like, no housewife is going to buy these because they just don't taste as good. So what happened to this loved banana We'll explain, and along the way take a look back at some other forgotten foods, and I'll chat with Broadway legend Andre de Shields about his special banana memories. And that's what you want for it to be. You wanted to change your default consciousness. Otherwise why eat it? And yes there will be singing. We've strink beans and onions and big juicy lemon and all sorts of fruit, and say from CBS Sunday morning, and I heart I'm Morocca. And this is mobituaries, this moment, the groomy shell death of a banana. Ah, the sound of mourning. Actually it's this sound that means morning to me, The dulcet tones of frozen bananas getting ground up. That's pretty much the only way I consume bananas these days in a blender with some other ingredients. To me, a banana is simply a potassium delivery system, too boring to eat on its own, which is why I was fascinated to learn that this wasn't always the case. That my grandparents enjoyed much better bananas. So how did we get here to these blah banas. I never intended to be sort of the world expert on any particular topic, let alone bananas, but I have come to um not just accepted, but embrace it. That's Dan Capell, the author of Banana, The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. He's researched and traveled the world, learning everything there is to know about bananas. Bananas were the very first cultivated fruit, and so we're talking ten thousand or more years that bananas have been part of the human diet and the human story. Actually, but in terms of bananas being available to people who don't live in places where bananas can grow, um, that's less than a hundred fifty years. The earliest bananas grew in the wild in Southeast Asia and then spread to other parts of the world. Spanish and Portuguese explorers and missionaries brought bananas to the New World in the fifteen hundreds, where the fruit would flourish in the Caribbean and Central America. The banana made its splashy US debut at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in eighteen seventy six. The event marking the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence introduced it's nearly ten mill the visitors to all sorts of innovations. Heinz Ketchup, a steam powered monorail, a suitcase that turned into a bathtub really, and Alexander Graham Bell's invention of a little something called the telephone, which is funny because as a child, I'm sure I tried to talk into a banana. But the banana plant in the exhibitions Horticultural Hall was reportedly such a sensation that a guard had to be put on lookout to prevent visitors from trying to grab a souvenir. Had people seen pictures of it before or did it just come as this surprise, this thing from almost like outer space. I think that exhibition probably made the banana more real to people. These exhibitions captured people's imaginations especially the imaginations of some entrepreneurs who then started looking at ways to bring bananas to the US. Those entrepreneurs began scouting tropical regions where bananas flourished, and while there were a number of rieties to choose from, sellers seized on the gromy shell banana, first grown on the Caribbean island of Martinique in the eighteen thirties. That in Jamaica, the groomy shell had spread throughout the Caribbean and Central America, and it became top banana in the US largely for one reason. The most important thing is that it's going to survive shipping. If dozens of us shipping, nothing else matters. And the grower shell survives shipping better than any other banana because of its tough skin and and it's slow ripening characteristics. And so that was the one that they were going to make their money on. Another benefit, every banana in the bunch or finger in the hand, if we're using proper terminology here, was exactly the same. Okay, quick banana biology lesson. You've probably noticed that the bananas you eat don't have seeds, those little black circles you might see. Our vestigial seeds remnants of an early species of banana. No seeds means bananas reproduce by a transplanting a piece of one plant, known as a sucker, to start growing another. They're basically clones. This means that most every banana we eat is genetically identical, tasting exactly the same, but also equally vulnerable. With every major company growing and selling the groomy shell and only the grow michell, the banana industry established what's called a monoculture, growing only one variety of a single crop. It would prove to be a dangerous gambit. After settling on the growny shell, the entrepreneurs needed to figure out how to bring these bananas in mass quantities to the United States. One of the first major companies to figure this out was the United Fruit, which would later become Chiquita. The company devised and innovative solution refrigerated shipping. This is not in the days of ubiquitous refrigeration. These banana ships had ice in them, tons and tons of ice that were put in these colds, and there were these elaborate ventilation systems into the cargo holes that would direct the cold towards them. The ships were painted white to keep them cool. Those refrigerated ships, each of which could carry up to a half million bananas, would become known as the Great White Fleet, eventually the largest private navy in the world. But there were still a few hurdles for the banana business, namely getting consumers to accept the product. For many of the prim and proper women of the Victorian era, eating a banana was simply too risque given the fruits suggestive shape. Many chose to slice or cut up their bananas and hide them in foil. To dispel the notion that banana eating was shameful, postcards were distributed showing perfectly respectable ladies delicately consuming the fruit out in the open. I have a few of them, of the very proper Victorian ladies holding bananas eating bananas. Um, they're weird. How are they? How are they holding them? That's not suggestive. They're holding them like they're at picnics, and you know they're eating them peeled with the peel hanging down on their hands instead of cut up. Um, and they're very proper. As inhibitions faded, that consumer had to be educated. Then they had to be seduced, because they had. I mean, knowing about it isn't enough. You have to want it, And then they had to be taught how to eat them and keep them. The banana was so foreign to so many, including immigrants at Ellis Island who were often given a banana as their first taste of America, that newspapers had to explain how to let them ripen and how to peel them. People also needed to be sold on the health benefits. United Fruit started using innovative tactics like getting doctors to endorse bananas as a great source of nutrition for babies, and after partnering up with another new food on the market, cornfl as, the banana companies helped revolutionize the consumer experience. They came up with what was basically the first supermarket coupon, and the banana companies basically say we're gonna offer a deal. If you buy milk, corn flakes and bananas, you'll get a refund or a coupon for the milk for free. Really smart because the banana companies didn't pay for it. They convinced the milk companies to pay for it. But it was the banana company's idea. It all worked. Bananas went mainstream no longer considered an exotic luxury item. Bananas were everywhere, and they were cheap, becoming known as the poor man's fruit. With ubiquity came good and bad. The good clever inventions like the banana split, just don't ask where it originated. Several towns take credit. And the bad that heskey banana appeal, which was becoming a hazard on city streets. A New York Times article from a TV before notes that a wealthy merchant age seventy five slipped on a banana peel while coming home from church and broke his leg. Quote he is not expected to recover. The creation of the New York City Sanitation Department was absolutely a reaction to the ubiquity of banana peals, and these uniform sanitation men were sent through the city to help solve this hazard. The police were also on the case. In eighteen nineties six, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of the New York City Police Department, warned his men of banana peals and their quote tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement. But rather than slip in popularity, bananas continued on their way to becoming the dominant fruit in America. In the early nineteen hundreds, consumption nearly tripled from fifteen million bunches sold to over forty million, out selling apples and oranges, and by the nineteen twenties, bananas were firmly entrenched in popular culture and even in language. The flapper slang term banana oil translated to nonsense when he tells you, I annoy you that banana oil, and all die for you that banana on. Just a few years later, George and Ira Gershwin would have a hit with but not for Me, using bananas to mean just playing crazy. I never water here from any cheerful Pollyanna, who tells face supplies amazing, it's a banana silent. Film stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin turned that dastardly banana peal into a classic comedy gag, and Yes we have No Bananas even got a sequel song sung here by an exasperated Eddie. Can't hey, hey, no, can take them away? Bananas, and specifically gromy shell bananas. We're here to stay, or so people thought, coming up a gromy shehall taste test with Broadway superstar Andre to Shields. But first, a mobituary tribute to another popular food of the past. It's been called America's forgotten fruit. I'm talking, of course, about the paw paw. Large, oblong and misshapen on the outside, a fruit that only a mother could love. With a custardy flesh and nickel sized seeds on the inside, the papa tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana. Found in at least twenty six states, the paw paw was a staple of many of American diets, a favorite dessert of George Washington, served chilled apparently, and eaten by Lewis and Clark and their men on their expedition. The fruit was even the subject of a song sung here by Burl Lives Whero. Where is dear little Susie Whero? Where is dear little Susie Whero? Where is dear little Susie? We're down under the ball? So why did the papa go bye bye? Much of it has to do with the fact that it ripens quickly and doesn't ship well, so you're not going to find it at the modern day supermarket. You have to forage for it, and really who has the time? Also, it's a little messied beat. New York Times article notes a woman could not eat a pawpaw in front of her lover because quote, the site is disgusting to the point of utter disillusion. Still, papas are out there. You just need to find them. Perhaps they're ripe for a comeback. So you want that to meet the wizard. That's the legendary Andre to Shields playing the Wizard in the Broadway musical The Whiz. Andre has been electrifying audiences for decades. You either got the hell on, Hey, that's Tom Hain't nonibo wad down Town went down under the ground and finally won his first Tony Award for Hades Town in at age seventy three, Baltimore, Maryland. Are you in the house? I am making good on my promise that I would come to New York and become someone you'd be proud to call your native son or Banana is a luxury growing up. I grew up in a food desert. There was hardly anything that was considered produce, and even if it were, it wouldn't have been fresh. You look at it and you think, oh, I shouldn't eat this, but that's the banana that we we're able to buy in our neighborhood. But as he ventured out in the world, Andre became a banana expert of sorts. Banana is more easily peeled if you do it from its black tip as opposed to the green stem. So pull off the black tip and eat it. I've never done that. Then peel the banana. You're not wasting any part of this. But I told you it was serendipitous when you asked Andrea d Ship to come on your podcast and talk about the banana Andre de peals. Back in the nineteen sixties, he even participated in one of the more trippy banana pads. Eat the banana, throw the peels into an oven. Once they're baked, the fiber on the inside becomes a lovely substitute for marijuana. Are you serious, I'm serious. So you you're smoking banana peals. Yeah, not the peel, but the fiber on the inside. Now, Andrea wasn't the only one doing this. A number of newspapers and magazines at the time shared stories on the popular trend, as well as recipes. A smoke to banana peel recipe was featured in the Notorious Anarchist cookbook, and many people also believed that the seven hit song Mellow Yellow was about smoking banana peels netana grace. In fact, the song wasn't about that. What's more, researchers and the FDA would investigate and determine that banana peels had no hallucinogenic properties. But it made for some good stories and probably some fun parties. Regardless. Andre is someone who knows a good banana, and with so many banana variety has grown around the world, he's tasted more than a few in his travels. He told me about a transformative experience he had while touring the United Arab Emirates in It was a banana that kicked but knocked me out. It was intoxicating, and that's what you want fruit to be. You wanted to change your default consciousness. Otherwise why eat it? And when I ate it, it tasted like a solid version of a cream sickle. Okay, like candy almost ice cream, a dessert, a dessert dessert exactly. It made me feel like I needed to repent. It was a guilty pleasure. It was a guilty pleasure, and you know, to have a banana. Do that to you is so surprising. We have become accustomed to a bland, utilitarian banana exactly. The banana that Andre eight in the UAE might well have been a variety similar to the blue java or ice cream banana grown in Asia, Australia and Hawaii, said to have a creamy texture like vanilla ice cream or custard. M m. You see, there are other more exotic varieties of bananas out there. In fact, there are still gromy shell bananas being grown on small lot farms. We acquired some from a specialty grower in Miami for a taste test on this very podcast with Andre to Shields. Would he find it as exciting as legend has it. For the sake of comparison, we started with today's banana of the Cavendish. This is the one you buy at your local supermarket, and exciting it is not. Okay, so we're going to take a bite. I'm ready when you are. This is your traditional taste of a banana that you would slice on to your cereal. There's nothing intense about this flavor. If this banana were a personality, what would that personality be? The one we just tasted the BBC News, the BBC News banana, which is dependable or reliable, But but what devoid of emotion? Right? No razzled asks? And then it was time time to taste the groomy shell. No, here we go, Okay, it's time, it's time. Bla, what do you think? It's a richer taste. It tastes definitely like it's come from the earth. This banana, the gro michell, had a little more maturity to it. It was slightly sexier. I wanted to chew it more slowly. I wanted to roll it around in my mouth. It had a few more tones, earthier, more mature, sexier. Who wouldn't want a gromy shell. People today don't know that they have settled for a lesser banana today. I think people do understand that. But in terms of present day America, that's the deal. You want to take it home. We want to leave it on the counter for a few days. We want to forget about it and then we'll go back. And we wanted to look exactly like it was when we bought it, or we're not going to eat it. Andre To Shields is a performer par excellence. He can sing, he can dance, he can wax poetic about bananas. So at the end of our conversation, I had one final request. I was praying that Tony Emmy and Grammy Award winning Andrea Shields would indulge my desire to sing, yes we have no bananas, a short version of it, indulging, Oh, yes we have no bananas. We have no bananas. Today we've strink beans and onions and big juicy lemon and all sorts of fruit, and say we have an old fashion tomacro how long island potato? But yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas. We've got no bananas. We have no bananas. To dat common hats off the Peggy Lee. Why Peggy Lee? If that's all there is, just keep dancing up. Next the Demise of the Groomy Shell. But first another mobituary tribute toy Forgotten Food. It was nine and NASA was preparing to and the first man to the Moon. Of course, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins would have to eat when they were in space. They couldn't just drink tang, So NASA teamed up with Pillsbury to create some innovative products, one of which was a rod shaped food designed for the astronauts to easily consume in their space suits. Enter the space food stick. With the American public going space crazy, Pillsbury decided to create a commercial version. Today, the United States has engaged in a gigantic effort to send men to the Moon. For this effort, Pillsbury has developed many special foods. Here is the first one to be made available to the public. Marketed as a new idea in snack foods, Space food Sticks came wrapped in shiny foil to give that space age appearance, and perhaps to jazz up the fact that the product kind of looked like a wooden dowl. The sticks came in flavors like chocolate, caramel, and peanut butter. Ads proclaimed that the sticks were only about forty four calories, but they nourish like a major meal. But just two years after space food Sticks hit the market, the novelty had worn off. Pillsbury decided to remove the word space from the name, and consumers seemed even less interested in buying food sticks. The product would eventually be discontinued. Space food Sticks are long gone, but are now hailed as a forerunner to today's energy bars. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for snack food at your grosses next to the instant breakfast section, space food sticks the energy snack from US Aerospace Research and Pillsbury. That's Harry Belafonte singing Dao, also known as the Banana boats song Mr Dali Mandali Di Banan. The tune was adapted from a Jamaican folk song believed to be sung by doc workers in the early nineteen hundreds as they worked overnight to pack bananas onto ships seven foot. While the beloved song is fun to sing, it's ultimately about a serious struggle, one that many people were facing as bananas became big business. The business model of bananas is to sell them for half the price of apples and oranges. That's banana author Dan Capell again. How do they do it? They do it by limiting the costs that they had control over, and those two costs were land and labor. And to get land, they would come up with these deals with Basically, the banana entrepreneurs owned all this land, and then to get labor, they exploited people. There's no other way to put it. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company owned land, employed thousands, and controlled railroads and utilities throughout much of Latin America and the Caribbean. The rapid acquisition of geographical and political control led to the company's nickname El Polpo the octopus. Banana workers became ponds of United Fruit and its competitor, Standard Fruit, later known as Dole. The companies seemed to stop at nothing to get bananas harvested and shipped to the United States. The Central American nations that produced bananas for United Fruit and others became known as banana republics. Yes, I know you might be thinking of that place where you buy khakis, but the origin of the term is far darker. Coined by author oh Henry, it came to mean governments centrally controlled by these banana companies, to the detriment of the people who actually lived there. They would install friendly governments. The workers had no rights. It was tragic and horrible. And this is the paradox of the banana. The fruit that we love so much comes with a very, very bloody cost that is mostly unknown and hidden to the average consumer. Then and now strikes riots and demands for better wages became common, but they were tamped down, often violently. In the Colombian military put an end to a strike in the town of Sienaga by opening fire on demonstrating United Fruit banana workers in what became known as the Banana Massacre, an event that would later be incorporated into the Gabrielle Garcia Marquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The death toll by some instruments was as high as two thousand. Another dramatic intervention happened several decades later, in nineteen fifty four and the form of a coup in Guatemala to oust the democratically elected president Hakabo R Ben's. He has campaigned on banana workers rights. He's been very careful. He has not asked for a lot. He's asked for some basic stuff, increases in pay. He's asked for some land back. But the banana companies can't abide this. And at this point in nine the banana companies are deeply, deeply involved in the United States government, so they have a lot of pole. At the time, United Fruit controlled fort of Guatemala's land, so our Ben's plans for a grarian reform were unacceptable. To the company. United Fruit launched a public relations campaign to convince the US government and the public that our Ben's was a communist and that Guatemala was a Soviet satellite state in the making, that commissioned so called studies on the situation, lobbied newspapers to convey their preferred narrative, and eventually put out a short film entitled why the Kremlin hates Bananas and Therefore the agents of international Communism have selected the United Fruit Company as a prime target of attack. Remember this was the nineteen fifties and the height of the Red Scare, and while Guatemalan President Urbans did have some Communists in his coalition, there was no evidence that he himself was one, much less working in concert with the Soviets. His idol was said to be f d R, and many of his social reforms were patterned after the New Deal. Nonetheless, President Eisenhower was convinced that the R Ben's government posed a threat and authorized the CIA to oust him. A coup was put into motion using radio propaganda, bombing raids, and a small band of Guatemalan exiles and Central American mercenaries. This results in the brutal overthrow of the Guatemalan government and the chaos that comes after that. Once our bands is deposed, he's humiliated, he's stripped, naked, forced to flee to Mexico, and Guatemala never really recovers from that. For forty or fifty years. Meanwhile, on the home front, United Fruit continued to win hearts and minds, providing books and pamphlets to schools on the value of bananas you might call it banana Ganda, and making movies like Journey to Banana Land. Today, fast white steamships travel across the Caribbean with cargoes more valuable than pirates. Gold officers and trim white uniforms pick up their golden cargoes from a place we called Banana Lam. The film goes inside Central American countries where everyone is hard at work but also happy, of course, as bananas are harvested. As the plant bends, the bunch comes down on the shoulder of another man who has called a backer. Each bunch ways from fifte seventy five palms. The United Fruit wanted people to buy their bananas and their bananas only, and a few years earlier had come up with a way to get brand recognition in the form of a certain cartoon character with a memorable tingle. I'm Takita Banana, and I've come to say bananas have to ripen in a certain way, and when they click with brown and have a golden hue, bananas tastes the best and not the best for you. Animated spokes banana, Miss Chiquita was an instant hit. Anyway you want to eat them, it's impossible to beat them. But banana is like the climate of a very very tropical equador. So you should never put bananas in the refriger on sidebar. With all due respect to Miss Chiquita, her parent company now notes it is okay to put bananas in the refrigerator after they've ripened. It'll keep them fresh just a little longer. The animated banana with a bowl of fruit on her head was modeled after a movie star, Carmen Miranda, known as the Brazilian Bombshell, who had shimmied and sombered her way to box office gold in the nineteen forties, at one point becoming the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Are you at there? Why does everybody look at me? And then begin to talk about the Pristmas three, I hope. That means that everyone he's glad to see the Lady and the two footi head. Carmen Miranda played on the stereotype of the fiery, tempered and lustful Latin American woman, but her talent was undeniable. Her lady in the two d fruity hat number in the film, The Gang's All Here is a banana extravaganza as dancers wave giant bananas around. The New York Times review of the film did note that the dance numbers quote seemed to stem straight from Freud. They weren't wrong. Carmen Miranda was inextricably tied to the banana, as she would often remind but don't forget people. I think there was lots of money being made with bananas for Carmen Miranda, United Fruit and others, but time was running out for the groomy shell. Trouble had been brewing since the early nineteen hundreds when bananas in Panama were infected by a fungus so it's named Panama disease. And this fung is not only destroys banana plantations very quickly, but thouls the soil in a way that the bananas cannot grow there pretty much ever again, and remember that banana biology lesson from earlier. The fact that each groomy shell banana was essentially a clone of every other groomy shell banana meant that if one banana were in danger, they all were. When Panama disease first hit, companies tried to outrun it, moving to different fields, starting over. But the disease was spreading fast and thousands of acres of land had to be abandoned. Its spread to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras. So you have this insane situation. Demand is increasing, you need to keep prices low, but land is getting more difficult to find because of this disease. Finally, after decades of battling Panama disease, the banana companies had to face facts. The grow Michelle as a mass market banana was doomed. They needed to find another variety. Changing the whole industry to another banana, which is a huge logistical issue, becomes sort of the worst choice to the sort of hide bound, entrenched banana barons. They don't want to do younger. You wait, it's the only choice, right, right, And so it's doll that begins experimenting with a replacement for the grow michell um and experiments with a whole bunch of them, and Cavendish is one of them. The Cavendish began to replace the grow michell in the late nineteen fifties. Now, as I've made clear, I find the Cavendish to be a boring banana. If you heard our season one episode on sitcom Deaths and Disappearances, you may remember the story of the two Darren's from Bewitched, two actors in the same role, the second one far lesser memorable than the first. You know where this is going. The Cavendish is the second Darren of bananas. There I've said it. It's also smaller than the groomy shell, and it bruises more easily. But it wasn't as susceptible to Panama disease. Would Americans accept this new, lesser banana. There were concerns, but as Dan Capell says, they ultimately didn't matter. Maybe it's the beginning of the age of fast food. Maybe the American palette is not so sophisticated. The transition who went fairly smoothly. I think there were very few people who sort of saw this new banana and recognize it as a new banana, or even taste it and said, you know, this doesn't taste right, It's not as good as the other one. By the nineteen sixties the transition was complete. Big Banana sold their final groomy shells in In the years since, we've all come to tolerate, if not embrace, the caven dish. But the Cavendish itself is also in danger, vulnerable to a number of diseases. And it's entirely possible that, yes, we have no bananas, could become our reality if the cabin dish goes the way of the groomy shell. If you were to eulogize to groomy shell, what might you say? I would say, it's nice to eulogize the growmer shell, and it clearly deserves eulogizing. But are good bananas out there, other bananas that are even better. And the idea that we should just give up and just accept this mediocre banana um and lament the better banana that's lost does not have to be the future of the banana. We can get those great bananas. You're a banana optimist. I am. I am the ultimate Banana Optimists. We leave you now with Broadway superstar Andrea Shields singing the Chaqueta Banana song and Jack the Banana and I'm here to say, but banana on your series like this today you loveth the breakfast or at any time, no matter when you eat it, those bananas tastes fine. We're going to issue that as its own single. I hope you savored this Mobituary. May I ask you to please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Here. All new episodes of Mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts and check out Mobituaries. Great Lives Worth Reliving the New York Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This episode of Mobituaries was produced by Zoe Marcus. Our team of producers also includes Aaron Shrank, Wilcome Martinez Cacceto, and Me Morocca. It was edited by Moral Walls and engineered by Josh Hahn, with fact checking by Katherine Newhan. Our production company is me On Media. Our archival producer is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Indispensable support from Craig Swaggler, Dustin Gerveis, Alan Pang, Reggie Basil, and everyone at CBS News Radio. The Irrefutable Aaron Shrink is our senior producer. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Steve Raise's and Morocco. The series is created by Yours truly and as always, undying thanks to Rand Morrison and John carp for helping breathe life into Mobituaries