The Fast Food Fruit

A truck is traveling on the freeway. Inside, stacks of bananas are piled high. Picked a few weeks ago at a plantation, they’ve traveled overseas in climate-controlled cargo ships, their color still green and unappetizing. But that won’t last for long. A colorless gas with a faint, sweet, and musky odor seeps from an open pouch placed inside the truck, quietly transforming the fruit en route. By the time the tropical fruit is in your grocery basket, they are a golden yellow.

This is not science fiction, but yet another attempt at perfecting the tropical fruit delivery process—a new ripening-on-the-go trick that Professor Bhesh, Dan Koeppel says that the banana industry “invented fast food in a way.” A banana may be healthier than a burger, but how it’s brought to you is not all that different. Before the fast-food industry learned to process, pack, and ship inexpensive temperature-controlled meals, banana carriers had already perfected their own shipping process. “If you look at the model of the industrialized supply chain, what they really came up with was a lot closer to what a fast-food chain does,” he says. The result “is bananas that arrive at the market on their final green day, and which will last exactly seven days before turning brown.”