Dando por sentado

When Spanish speakers accuse someone of doing this, they literally mean that person is "giving for seated" something, or "taking it for granted." I believe I am not alone in "giving for seated" one of my typical breakfast foods: bananas. During a short stop at a banana-packing facility, I quickly realized that this fruit, which is so easy to eat, is quite difficult to produce. 

I'm not even going to address the effort required to start a banana plantation. I'll just pretend some Juanny Bananaseed magically planted pairs of trees and dug ditches for drainage in fields across Latin America. But then the work begins, first with the effort of keeping the plants pest-free. Planes are used to drop pesticides on the fields, but individual bunches of bananas also are wrapped in bags -- by hand -- to protect the fruit from infestation. 

When the fruit is ready for harvest, while the bananas are still green, workers hack off the bunches with machetes. Then, to add insult to injury, they have to cut down the whole tree so its planted partner can grow while it recovers. Each bunch of bananas is carried to -- by hand -- and hung on a rolling hook attached to an extensive maze of overhead tracks, which lead to the packaging building. The bunches of bananas are dragged to the building by human power, not motors. And by bunch, I don't mean the amount we usually buy at the store, but tiers of "feet" on a single stem that can weigh upwards of 100 pounds. Workers have to use all their strength to get the momentum to pull the stems --by hand -- to the facility, which can be multiple kilometers away. Then the tiers are cut off the stems -- by hand -- and thrown into pools of water to wash off dirt and insects that were able to get through the protective blue-bag covering. The tiers are then cut apart -- by hand -- by women who determine within a split second of sight what grade each banana is, based on its length and peel condition. The lowest-quality bananas are thrown into the overhead conveyor belt, which delivers the fruit to a truck that takes them directly to local stores. These "rejects" are given away for next to free, then resold for only slightly more, and let me tell you, they are even better than the ones you get in the States because they are fresher. The two higher grades of bananas continue to be prepared for export. They are sprayed -- finally, not by hand -- with solution that seals them off from pests and bruises during shipment. Yes, even the stickers are labor-intensive because they are put on -- by hand! The top-grade bananas are labeled Chiquita, and the second level gets a variety of brand names. But in the end, they all come from the Chiquita farm, and if even the rejects taste good, is it really necessary to pay extra for a prettier sticker? Last but not least, the bananas are packed into boxes -- by hand -- for export. The boxes of fruit are shipped both by land and sea into the United States. The duration of delivery is about about a month, which is why the bananas are shipped while they are still green, so they will be the perfect ripeness when they appear in your produce department. All this work, just to create a food that takes only the effort of an easy peel to eat. Perhaps the next time you complain about a brown spot, you won't take that for granted.