I am incapable of transporting a banana from the - what do you call the place where they keep the bananas at the grocery store? It's not an aisle. Usually a freestanding thing. The banana section? Banana stand? Banana shelf? Display? Kiosk? Island? Let's go with island. I am incapable of transporting a banana from the banana island at the grocery store to my house without some degree of careless smashing.**
Despite the lackluster state of most of the local fruit & vegetable supply, bananas here are usually adequate, even in the winter - not because bananas are locally grown in Alaska (they are so, so not) but because bananas are also not locally grown in California or Texas or Florida or any of the other similar places I have saved on my phone's weather app for regular winter morning perusal and fist-shaking, i.e. we get the same imported bananas that all of those places get, just after maybe ten days in transit to get here instead of seven days to California. So while some elitist Costa Rican might laugh at what we consider to be plátanos frescos, they are comparable to what I have always seen in the rest of the country and seem just fine. This is decidedly different from, say, oranges, which are grown in many pleasantly-climated U.S. places, whose short-pantsed citrus-hoarding residents take all the good ones directly off of the trees (presumably) and then send us the misshapen yellowish dregs, probably in a big box with a note that says "Sorry, we each took a few extra so we could make juice for breakfast by the pool tomorrow before we all go play golf, in February. But yeah, that Iditarod thing sounds pretty neat for you guys, we'd definitely like to get up there to see that some time." I guess that's fine because Alaska does the same thing with oil, where we take it out of the ground and then ship it to an out-of-state refinery so we can pay inflated gas prices because of the transportation costs to get it back here and awwwwwww dammit I think we're doing it wrong.
Anyway, the bananas are decent. And even though I always take the time to pick out a near-perfect one with no blemishes, by the time I get it into our kitchen, one end is mashed in and it's speckled with brown spots and it generally looks like I carried it home using a pair of spaghetti tongs that I was clenching between my chin and my shoulder, which is to say: not gently.
That banana has a sticker on it that says it came from Ecuador. It traveled 5,700 miles from some giant South American plantation to the produce section at the Fred Meyer on Muldoon Road in Anchorage, under care of what is evidently a super-cautious team of harvesters, labelers, packagers, drivers, loaders, barge captains, unloaders, more drivers, more unloaders, unpackers, and stockers, arriving in a store three miles from my house without a single discernible surface imperfection, and then the dream team of me and Janet The Cashier manages to beat the crap out of it during its twenty-five minutes in our collective custody, from the time I pick it up from the shelf until I get it home to put it on a different shelf.
The credit must primarily go to whoever packs them up in their shipping containers, which I originally assumed to be some sort sophisticated active-response tri-axially shock-absorbent temperature- and humidity-controlled self-stabilizing pods (which I suppose could be unrealistic for something that costs like $0.40) but may in fact just be cardboard boxes lined with a sheet of plastic, at least according to a clip on YouTube called "Banana video: How they get into the box?", posted by a guy named "Banana" Chris Müller who has finally addressed the Internet's shortage of barely-decipherable heavily German-accented narration over steel drum music. Somehow, these people are consistently packaging boxes that arrive in Alaska full of pristine unbruised bananas while using only the exact same materials I once used to make a house for a pet turtle.
So: Well done, Ecuadorian banana packers. Please forward any advice you might have for finishing the last 0.05% of the journey without screwing it up once it is out of your hands.
*Possible fantasy football team name?
**Oh yeah? Whatever. YOU don't seem like the kind of thing worthy of inspiring an entire blog post.
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