Sunday 8 April 2018

six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch!

A group of post-graduate students in Iceland have conferred a banana a passport so they can study not only the scope and complexity of the process and infrastructure that brought the single piece of fruit from its place of origin in Ecuador but also the reductive nature of food labelling and how no product or produce is from just one place, passing seamlessly from palette to plate.
Following the fortnight-long journey of a banana of nearly nine thousand kilometres whose handled by thirty-three individuals on each day of the travel—without deference to the growers or consumers, really, illustrates the impact of upholding global trade networks, bearing in mind that more finished- rather than harvested-goods can encircle the planet several, on ocean-going vessels (the fact that the seas are brought into this petty land-lubbing ordeal is also overlooked) times before reaching the purchaser. The same group has also examined the travels of Iceland’s chief exports—cod and aluminium