Gros Michel

This essay was written during the spring quarter of my junior year at the University of Denver. It was written for a course titled "Creative Writing: Nonfiction", and the course was taught by Dr. Selah Saterstrom (a professor whose prose I admired before I ever attended the university. You can imagine my nervousness in taking the course.) This essay uses a rotting banana as a starting point in exploring generational trauma, privilege, body image, and identity.

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This banana is the last one left of the bunch. I didn’t intentionally leave it rotting. I’m just forgetful. In the least, I ate the rest of the bunch. I got it from Natural Grocers where they’re organic and overpriced because I needed the bananas as soon as possible and there was no other grocery store nearby. I picked them up after dropping a package off at the post office. Just the bananas and some green tea powder. As overpriced as they were, I thought to myself about how they better be the best damn bananas I’ve ever had in my life. I was shocked to find that they were.

I kept meaning to use that banana in a smoothie. See, my logic was that the browner a banana is, the sweeter it should be, so I left it alone. Maybe my mistake was in leaving it somewhere unconventional (on top of my microwave.) I didn’t want to keep it near my other food. When bananas decay, they release a chemical that causes the food around it to take on the same flavor. I left a banana and a brownie in a box overnight once and my brownie ended up tasting overwhelmingly like banana. A fun unintentional science experiment. When it happened, one of my friends joked that the banana and the brownie had sex when I wasn’t looking.

Now it’s too brown. Aside from right when the stem meets the fruit, the entire banana is a dark brown, not quite black, though in my forgetfulness I have been witness to black bananas before. Still not good to eat. Maybe decent to use in some banana bread, but I’d need a whole bunch for that. It’s squishy. I always preferred bananas that were barely out of their green state, only using brown bananas for smoothies. Despite how ravenously I ate the rest of the bananas, I still left this one behind and forgot about it. I guess the deliciousness of the best bananas I’ve ever had in my life couldn’t overpower how easily I forget about things.

The entire thing is all one even shade of brown. Honestly, it’s kind of impressive. It feels bad to waste something so expensive. It’s just between that state of full-on rot and edibility. When I threw it away, it became misshapen against the floor of the trash can.

The Gros Michel was the most commonly used commercial banana variety until the 1950s. It is now only grown by private farmers. The most commonly used recipe for artificial banana flavoring still bases its taste on it. The few people who have the awareness to wonder why banana flavoring tastes nothing like real bananas often never learn its true history. Most people have only ever tasted Gros Michel bananas through its artificial duplicate without ever knowing it. As small of an action as biting into a piece of banana Laffy-taffy causes the senses to transcend time. I always thought this was a strangely poetic story of loss and legacy. The blood that courses through me contains traces of the old self, past generations, in an entirely new body, often in ways I do not fully realize. Or perhaps the way I wear my heritage is parading a bastardization of a culture that is dead to my family.

My mother insists that we have to work extra hard to keep weight off our bodies because our ancestors, on both sides, had the magic to change their bloodline with the power of hard times and starvation. They would have fought tooth and nail to eat the banana I so carelessly threw away. When I let hunger consume me in high school, perhaps I was fighting the force of hundreds of generations of exiled and murdered family members begging me to take full advantage of my access to food. How beautiful a fat great-great granddaughter would have been to a skinny and poor farmer in the early 1900s.

There’s this issue with how we define “poor.” I’m a food service worker with no disposable income outside of funding my college. One time, my suitemate ordered a quinoa bowl and did not tip the delivery driver. “Poor college student things!” she said. Poor college student. How much better am I than her, who overpaid for some bananas because I didn’t want to travel further than I had to? A privilege, isn’t it, to waste that last single banana that someone worked to grow? Likely someone from a developing country without running water. When my illness gets too harsh, I stay in the shower for hours. I imagine that my Appalachian grandfather is looking at me with disgust. Never met him. Hardworking man, orphan, died too soon. Maybe my paternal great grandpa, a farmer who escaped a pogrom in Russia and likely had never seen a banana in his life before he got here, and him were standing in solidarity in the corner of my shower, looking at me, judging me, naked and pathetic with the privilege of letting hair dye run down my back as I sit for hours.

“It had a face. Eat it,” my dad used to say to a younger me. Doubtful, I would think, looking down at some poor family staple not-quite-meat. Well, kind of poor. Nothing compared to how poor all four of my grandparents were. Nothing compared to whoever grew that banana. My dad and I have really been bonding over how hard of a worker I’ve become. My struggle shows that I’m an adult now.

I’m still not working hard enough.