Free Banana by Dan Koeppel Page A

try something never before attempted on any large scale: refrigerated shipping. Chilled air keeps bananas green, allowing them to travel farther distances. The banana entrepreneur set up a series of cold-storage warehouses throughout the United States, connected to a network of shipping facilities and railroad hubs. The Fruit Dispatch Company became the first of more than a dozen interlocking subsidiaries under the company’s control. (The structural labyrinth would lead to repeated antitrust battles over the next century, along with a nickname that is still used in Latin America: El Pulpo, or The Octopus.)
    Late nineteenth-century refrigeration wasn’t the system of condensers and compressed gases we’re familiar with today. Instead, Boston Fruit’s storerooms, boxcars, and cargo vessels operated exactly like the old-fashioned cooling units our grandparents or great-grandparents used. They required blocks of ice—thousands of them. Ice became so essential to banana profitability that at least one banana merchant—an importer named Joseph Vaccaro, based in New Orleans—bought up every ice factory along the Gulf Coast. His reduced, no-middleman cooling costs made his company the second big success story in the banana industry. Vaccaro called his company Standard Fruit, and it remains Chiquita’s primary competitor, now operating under the Dole brand name.
    What Preston and Baker accomplished with their bananas should have been impossible. They brought consumers a highly perishable tropical product, intact and ready to eat, thousands of miles from the place where it grew, at a price everyone could afford. They did it by developing a formula the banana conglomerates still employ today: Work on a large scale, control transportation and distribution, and aggressively dominate land and labor. The result? The banana cost half as much as apples, and Americans couldn’t get enough of the new fruit. But Caribbean property was growing scarcer, and coordinating shipping between multiple islands was too costly. The enterprise—and the banana—needed to move west.

CHAPTER 10
Taming the Wild
    C ENTRAL AMERICA’S CLIMATE was perfect for bananas. There were just two problems: There was no place to grow them and no way to move the fruit in the quantities required to make it as ubiquitous as Preston and his colleagues desired. Except for a few coastal areas, the entire isthmus, from Guatemala to Panama, was thick forest, filled with everything from malaria-carrying mosquitoes to jaguars and poisonous snakes. Apart from a few capital cities, what few villages there were in Central America’s interior were tiny; most of their residents lived an unadorned existence, sometimes amidst the ruins of fabulous Mayan cities.
    Early attempts to tame the land had ended in disaster. Since the sixteenth century, Europeans had dreamed of a continental bypass, a canal that would stretch fifty miles along the region’s narrow point, from the Caribbean Sea, over the mountains, to the Gulf of Panama. But the first serious effort to build a water route to the Pacific, undertaken by the French—they’d already built the Suez Canal, a project that cut through flat, dry terrain—had ended tragically. More than 25,000 Panamanian and French workers died during the attempt, which was abandoned in 1893, thirteen years after it was begun. If the French had paid attention to a project undertaken a bit farther north a few years earlier, they might have understood the risks involved. Banana men were also attempting to cut their way inland. Their effort proved just as deadly—but it would succeed.

    HENRY MEIGGS , an East Coast businessman, arrived in San Francisco during the 1849 gold rush. Soon after landing in the booming city, Meiggs began to solicit backers for an ambitious undertaking—building a huge dock and cannery complex at the northwest edge of the city. Meiggs finished the job but failed