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Preface This book began as a research question focused on the relationship between social and environmental change in Honduras. Over many years, it has evolved into a study of the mass production and mass consumption of bananas—the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States. The title refers both to the tropical places where export bananas grew and the cultural spaces where bananas were consumed. When I first became interested in the topic as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, events taking place in Honduras and Central America routinely made headlines in the United States. Today, the U.S. government’s latest effort to ‘‘install democracy’’ has shifted public attention to other places and commodities. In Honduras, the value of exports of apparel now dwarfs that of banana exports. However, this ought not to discourage serious reflection on the history of bananas—an important internationally traded commodity that gave rise to, among other things, the United Fruit Company, one of the first and most powerful transnational corporations of the past century. Living in an era when many people seem at a loss to imagine a world not dominated by corporations and mass markets, it strikes me as imperative to reexamine the historical processes that have shaped places where commodities are produced and consumed. If this book has an overriding message, it is the need for people to think and act in ways that acknowledge the dynamic relationships between production and consumption, between people and nonhuman forms of life, and between cultures and economies. Ultimately, I believe that many twentieth-century models and ideologies of development and conservation are flawed because they share underlying (and unexamined) assumptions that nature and culture are either static or change in predictable ways. However, there is little that is timeless about nature—human or otherwise. On a less lofty level, this book seeks to answer (finally) a question that friends, family members, and acquaintances frequently ask: ‘‘Do you x ba na na c u lt u r e s eat bananas?’’ The simple answer, for me, is ‘‘yes’’ (organic when available ). But the question itself is somewhat misguided. In the contemporary United States, food and eating have produced both high anxieties and great denials. One result is a tendency to inscribe moral judgments upon particular foods, such as bananas, veal, grapes, or the most recent (and sweeping) evil: carbohydrates. An alternative approach might be to rephrase the question as ‘‘What does it mean to eat bananas?’’ This question compels us to think about people in the United States who consume inexpensive , identical looking and tasting bananas on an everyday basis while symbolically distancing themselves from the ‘‘banana republics’’ where people live and labor to produce inexpensive, identical looking and tasting bananas. In other words, the question forces us to ponder consumption, work, power, history, and the nature of banana cultures. ...

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