The Apple-Banana Paradox

Why the story of the world's favourite fruit is actually the story of everything

I’m pretty sure you won’t have come across the Apple-Banana Paradox before, and the main reason for that is that I’ve just made it up. But this novel economic phenomenon is worth spending a moment pondering, if only because it tells you rather a lot about the nature of the 21st century world.

Granted, “paradox” is a little bit of a fancy word for a perfectly simple phenomenon, which is as follows. Up until the late 1990s, the price of a kilogram of apples in the UK - and, as far as I can work out in much of the rest of Europe - was more or less the same as the price of a kilo of bananas. They were moving in lockstep with each other.

Then, something changed. From the year 2000 onwards, the price of the average kilo of apples carried on merrily rising upwards, along with most of the rest of the consumer price index from which we calculate inflation. The price of a kilo of bananas on the other hand? Well, have a look…

Essentially, the price of bananas has been more or less flat for the last quarter century. It is a remarkable thing, in a world accustomed to inflation, to see that flat line. And it’s all the more remarkable when you think about what it takes to get a banana in a store in Europe.

There’s the obvious thing, of course: the fact that bananas do not grow in countries like Britain, or most parts of the developed world. Therefore, unlike apples, which grow in millions of gardens around the country, bananas must be transported thousands of miles, mostly from countries in Latin America, before they are bought for less than 20p, peeled and enjoyed.

The process of shipping is a marvel of modern economics. The bananas are cut from the plant in Colombia or Costa Rica. At this point they are still green and absolutely rock hard. They are placed in a refrigerated shipping container at around 13 degrees, at which temperature they enter a sort of suspended animation. The voyage across the Atlantic takes two or three weeks, after which the refrigerated container is offloaded (still cold) onto a truck which then drives from the port to a special ripening centre.

I visited one of these ripening centres a few weeks ago, in the course of recording an episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters. It was, from the outside at least, just another warehouse in yet another industrial estate in the Midlands. But once inside you encounter vast troves of bananas - literally millions of bananas, most of them looking bright green and distinctly inedible.

There is such a thing as an official banana spectrum: seven different shades of banana, from the totally green to the yellow and slightly blotchy. And in the course of their stay at the banana ripening centre, the bananas are woken up from their refrigerated slumber - a process that happens thanks to an infusion of the petrochemical gas ethylene and a slightly warmer environment - whereupon they begin to change colour. Once they are closing in on colour stage four they are dispatched to the shops.

The banana seven colour spectrum. Source

It is a finely-honed operation. When we visited the warehouse was a flurry of constant motion as we dodged one pallet after another - bananas here, bananas there, some coming in from Colombia, some being sent out to supermarkets around the country. And well it might be. If supermarkets get their consignment of bananas one day too late then they have to wrestle with the prospect of empty shelves, or shelves full of unappetising, blotchy bananas of colour shade 7.

While there are thousands of different varieties of bananas, only a few are able to cope with the trauma of being plucked off a tree, refrigerated, woken up in another country and then carted off to be sold in a supermarket. Over time, wholesalers have experimented with all sorts of different varieties, from the Indonesian Barangan to the Lady Finger to the Praying Hands and the Blue Java. What most of them had in common was that after being shipped and reanimated in a warehouse like the one outside Coventry, they ended up as gooey mush.

In fact there are only two varieties of banana that were compatible with the exigencies of global trade. The first was called the Gros Michel. The “Big Mike” was, by all accounts, a delicious banana - the iconic banana. Eat a banana flavoured sweet and that almost overly banana-ish taste is based on the taste of the Gros Michel.

The Gros Michel banana - subtly different and subtly tastier than the ones you’ve eaten

For much of the early 20th century, the Gros Michel was the mainstay of global banana production. Those early supply chains, connecting Latin America with the rest of the world, via Reefers run by the terrifying mighty banana oligarchs who would frequently meddle with Latin American regimes… well that was all Big Mike. More than 90 per cent of all bananas shipped around the world were this variety. And not just this variety: they were genetically identical, being clones of each other.

But there’s a reason I’m writing in the past tense here. A monoculture is a breeding ground for diseases and the Gros Michel fell victim to something known as Fusarium Wilt, or, to be precise, Fusarium Wilt R1.

A nasty disease that essentially eats a banana plant from inside, over the course of the 20th century R1 spread from one highly concentrated banana plantation to another, devastating crops as it went. By the 1950s, the global banana crop was close to oblivion. For a period, the world’s retailers looked over the precipice and contemplated a world without bananas.

Then they discovered the Cavendish. The story of the Cavendish, which actually derived from a sample bred at the enormous greenhouse at the Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire, seat of the Duke of Devonshire, is most brilliantly told by journalist Harry Wallop in this long read a few years back.

The Cavendish is a fine variety of banana, albeit with a slightly less sweet, banana-ish taste than the Gros Michel (I confess I’ve never tasted a Big Mike before so I’m going off what I’m told here - if any of you have, please describe in the comments). But what it lacks in taste, the Cavendish makes up for in that it is just as good - by some metrics even better - at coping with the traumas of being shipped to the other side of the world.

The familiar Cavendish banana. Pretty much every banana you’ve eaten will be a clone of the ur Cavendish, which goes back to Chatsworth

And so the global banana industry switched en masse from the Gros Michel to the Cavendish. Today, if you’re eating a banana in Europe or the US or indeed anywhere where bananas don’t grow, it will be a Cavendish. We have swapped one monoculture for another.

The great advantage of monocultures is that they are, in economic terms at least, a tremendously efficient way to produce staggering volumes of crops at a staggeringly low price. All of which brings us back to the Apple-Banana Paradox. Now while in some respects it might seem odd that bananas could somehow be frozen in price for decades, in other respects their remarkable cheapness tells you something else.

It tells you how efficient the supply chains for goods have become. One of the single most important (and least appreciated) things that has happened in the past century is that the simple act of moving goods from one side of the world to the other has become astonishingly cheap. This, by the way, is part of the backstory to the new book I’ve been working on (OUT IN SEPTEMBER, PRE-ORDER HERE). These invisible shifts in the plumbing of the world have had an outsize impact on our lives, but since they are, well, mostly invisible, few are all that aware of their profundity - of the hidden journey stuff takes to get to us.

In some respects, this is not all that dissimilar to the situation a few years ago. Back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution it was cheaper to ship coal from Newcastle to London than to transport it a few miles inland - mostly because roads in England used to be so rubbish. Today, the roads are (slightly) better but the shipping industry has become so brilliant at doing its job that it is cheaper, sometimes, to ship a banana from Latin America than it is to transport an apple from Somerset to London.

But the other reason bananas are so cheap is that instead of replacing the old Big Mike monoculture with something more sustainable, we have doubled down on it. All of which is why we should all be paying more attention to the rise of something called TR4.

TR4 is another sort of Fusarium Wilt, a cousin of the one that did for the Gros Michel. And while the Cavendish was resistant to the old R1 variety that killed its predecessor, it is not immune to TR4. In fact, TR4 is spreading very fast - by some yardsticks even faster than the last global banana pandemic was.

This chart shows you the rise both of the old disease that killed the last global banana species (I say “killed”, but the Gros Michel still exists - just not in the quantities necessary to make it a viable global banana) and the new disease. In short, there is a very real prospect that the dominant global banana species might soon be wiped out.

All of which would raise some serious questions about the way we run the world. Because the story of the banana isn’t just a story about a funny-looking fruit. In fact, it’s deathly serious and tells you all sorts of things about the way we’ve arranged the world around us.

Anyway, much more on this in a data primer I’ve just made for Sky, which you can watch here:

Oh, and if I’m allowed yet another plug, you really ought to subscribe to Stuff Matters and hear more about this - about the wild stories of coups and banana wars, about the backstory of the Cavendish and the hidden life of everyday objects. I dragged Harry Wallop back to a banana warehouse and we had some fun. And it is genuinely one of the more bonkers stories I’ve ever encountered…