“This shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s!” I will always remember how Gwen Stephani’s catchy tune “Hollaback Girl” finally taught me how to spell bananas. To this day I still have to sing the song to get it right, but hey, at least I learned. Learning is an essential part of life; an unknown source said it best, “if we cease to learn, we die.” This quote holds true, in that learning is imperative, as it presents us with information that can be useful when making difficult decisions. Yet, I have found that throughout the years, people seem to care less and less about what it is that they are learning – even when it comes to what they eat.
Take the banana for instance, a ubiquitous and present part of American culture, and an icon of both breakfast …show more content…
So how did they manifest themselves into the diets of millions of Americans? The answer is with the help of a man named Samuel Zemurray, a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived in Alabama, in 1895. (“Five Lessons From the Banana Man”). Zemurray is responsible revolutionizing the banana trade in the United State because he bought bananas that had freckles that were otherwise headed for the trash and then sold them out of railroad cars to grocers to compensate for their ripeness. Bananas rot very easily so before they were loaded for transport, people would examine the bananas by the standard “one freckle turning, two freckles ripe” (Cohen para1). From that point on, the banana, market grew rapidly, and Zemurray took drastic measures to keep up with the growing demand, stopping at nothing, even overthrowing the Honduran Government to continue expanding the market (Cohen para …show more content…
Think about it, the banana is something that people see every day, and most people do not even begin to think about where it comes from. For something as common as the banana, you would think that more people would have an understanding of its commodity chain and basic botanical knowledge, especially since it is something that they are putting in their body, but people do not. The fact that people are not concerned with the origin or history of things like the banana is a prime example of the dysfunctional educational system within the United States. This is an issue because primary and secondary schools are not propagating the right schools of thought. Classrooms across the nation revolve around state and government standards and impending standardized tests at the end of the year, which often results in teachers teaching students to understand a piece of paper instead of understanding the world around them. This type of educational system exposes students to what I like to call the school of no thought, as students are not taught how to think, they are taught how to pass tests. Now that’s how you get a population that does not concern itself with information on the things around them. If society cannot bother to understand or ask about elementary facts about foodstuffs like the banana, then how can people even begin to understand the more complex issues that plague society
Take the banana for instance, a ubiquitous and present part of American culture, and an icon of both breakfast …show more content…
So how did they manifest themselves into the diets of millions of Americans? The answer is with the help of a man named Samuel Zemurray, a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived in Alabama, in 1895. (“Five Lessons From the Banana Man”). Zemurray is responsible revolutionizing the banana trade in the United State because he bought bananas that had freckles that were otherwise headed for the trash and then sold them out of railroad cars to grocers to compensate for their ripeness. Bananas rot very easily so before they were loaded for transport, people would examine the bananas by the standard “one freckle turning, two freckles ripe” (Cohen para1). From that point on, the banana, market grew rapidly, and Zemurray took drastic measures to keep up with the growing demand, stopping at nothing, even overthrowing the Honduran Government to continue expanding the market (Cohen para …show more content…
Think about it, the banana is something that people see every day, and most people do not even begin to think about where it comes from. For something as common as the banana, you would think that more people would have an understanding of its commodity chain and basic botanical knowledge, especially since it is something that they are putting in their body, but people do not. The fact that people are not concerned with the origin or history of things like the banana is a prime example of the dysfunctional educational system within the United States. This is an issue because primary and secondary schools are not propagating the right schools of thought. Classrooms across the nation revolve around state and government standards and impending standardized tests at the end of the year, which often results in teachers teaching students to understand a piece of paper instead of understanding the world around them. This type of educational system exposes students to what I like to call the school of no thought, as students are not taught how to think, they are taught how to pass tests. Now that’s how you get a population that does not concern itself with information on the things around them. If society cannot bother to understand or ask about elementary facts about foodstuffs like the banana, then how can people even begin to understand the more complex issues that plague society