Going Bananas - Banana Cultures - page 16

Streich the right to lease propertyalongside the railroad in order to estab-
lish banana farms. In 1905, the concession passed to one Samuel Zemur-
ray, who, with financial backing from United Fruit Company, purchased
Streich'sCuyamelCompany.OneyearpriortoZemurray'sarrivalinHon-
duras, the New Orleans-based Vaccaro Brothers and Company received
a concession to build a railroad in the newly created province of Atlán-
tida. 72 Like Streich, theVacarros built their line for the expressed purpose
of hauling bananas.TheVaccaros received additional concessions in 1906
and 1910 to extend their railroad and to build a pier capable of handling
large steamships. 73 These railroad projects initiated a trend that would
eventually leave just two companies in control of the production, trans-
portation, and distribution of export bananas.
However, the process of vertical integration did not take place over-
night; as late as 1910, the Honduran government asserted that the coun-
try remained the only place where U.S. shipping companies had failed to
establish monopolies:
The growers long ago stopped enforcing the law [Decree 30 of 1893]
under pressure from the fruit buyers who, by discrediting Honduran
fruit in the United States, have reduced the possibility of attracting the
new traders needed to increase competition. In the American ports, the
fruit from Honduras is divided on the basis of quality. High quality
fruit is sent to markets bearing the name of bananas from Limón
[Costa Rica], Jamaica, or Bocas del Toro [Panamá]; the remaining
fruit—bruised and rotten—is sold as Honduran fruit. The cause of this
hostility is that Honduras is the only free market for bananas, the only
one not found under the iron control of the American dealers. 74
Whether Honduran banana sales suffered from a marketplace conspiracy
is unclear, but the government report reflected a heightened awareness
of the importance of quality standards set by shippers, distributors, and
retailers in distant markets. As the banana passed from being an exotic
novelty to join apples, table grapes, and citrus as standard fare in U.S. fruit
baskets, defining quality became increasingly important.
the consumers
Well before bananas became commonplace in U.S. diets, theyentered
popular culture as an icon of tropical nature and people. The early-
nineteenth-century travels of Alexander Von Humboldt and Aimé Bonp-