Fresh from the Field: Bananas for Bananas

Greetings, crazy lovers of good food, Phil here to spill what’s super-good in Produce. To start, you want tasty pears? Try some organic Bartletts from Argentina. Pear trees love it down there, the fruit is peaking, and the flavor is out of this world. Hurry down before they’re gone.

Now, the really big news is Bananas. The Co-op has struck a deal with the good people at Equal Exchange to bring in outstanding Fair-Trade organic bananas from Ecuador, grown by the El Guabo

farmer Co-op.

El Guabo is made up of about 450 small-scale Banana farmers. The notion that the banana FARMERS own the business is quite revolutionary. El Guabo owns both the farms and the export wing, and shares ownership of importing with Equal Exchange. These farmers have effectively eliminated the middlemen.

By middlemen, of course, I mean the folks at Dole, Delmonte and Chiquita. Over the years American fruit interests have pillaged Latin America, exporting valuable food and turning huge profits while impoverishing the workers and their communities. Also, conventional Banana farms use colossal amounts of chemicals to keep their trees free from fungus and these chemicals have had a devastating environmental impact in banana-producing regions. El Guabo hopes to serve as a model for change and La Montañita’s support will help.

And the other great news? We won’t have to charge an arm and a leg. Our banana price will stay right where it is, at $1.29/lb. Everyone involved with this deal is way stoked. We received the first shipment today and the bananas looked great. Want still more awesome? Instead of ripening in San Francisco and then putting them on a refrigerated truck, now they’re ripening right here in Albuquerque! This means we can finally offer bananas at an ideal degree of ripeness.

So please, come down to the Co-op and help us change the world, one bunch at a time.

Phil