The consumer price should be double what it is now for a fair production chain’, say Van Rijn en Kema. ‘A fair price provides the workers on banana plantations with wages that offer a better standard of living than is currently the case,’ Van Rijn states. ‘Prices within the chain are currently on the rise due to fuel prices for air and sea freight,’ Kema adds. ‘Moreover, the increased need for pesticides also increases the expenses for the farmers. South American bananas we eat have been sprayed at least 40 to 65 times per year, which makes bananas one of the least sustainable crops.’ The same bananas Chances are, you’ve never heard of the guy who was famously called America’s Banana King. But if you’re not aware of some of the things he’s done, you’ll never be a big winner on Jeopardy or pass an AP test in modern world history. Just for example, he was the guy who engineered the CIA-led coup that overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954, ushering in an era of intensified hatred for the United States throughout Latin America. There is a lot to learn about the impact of the banana on the world. And I would bet that all, or surely most of it, is in this book. Banana was a fun, educational and often surprising read. There is a lot of information to take in, and while you may know some of the info here, it is certain that there is a bunch you do not. Did you know that the banana tree isn’t properly a tree, but a very large herb? Neither did I. Or that the bananas we eat are considered berries? Say it ain’t so.

It's absolutely wild how much pain and destruction a couple of fruit companies have caused on this earth. And how much financial and political power they have wielded in the United States and continue to wield. After the war, both the political landscape and United Fruit’s swelling size changed the Central American isthmus. Cohen asserts, “By 1942, the company owned 70 percent of all private land in Guatemala, controlled 75 percent of all trade, and owned most of the roads, power stations and phone lines, the only Pacific seaport and every mile of railroad.” Guatemala’s people had had enough and were inflamed with desire to end the brand of colonialism and racism they associated with United Fruit. In 1951, charismatic revolutionary leader Jacobo Arbenz assumed Guatemala’s presidency and one year later signed “Decree 900,” which gave the government the right to appropriate hundreds of thousands of acres of United Fruit property which was distributed among Guatemalan peasants. To most people, a banana is a banana: a simple yellow fruit. Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined. In others parts of the world, bananas are what keep millions of people alive. But for all its ubiquity, the banana is surprisingly mysterious; nobody knows how bananas evolved or exactly where they originated. Rich cultural lore surrounds the fruit: In ancient translations of the Bible, the 'apple' consumed by Eve is actually a banana (it makes sense, doesn't it?). Entire Central American nations have been said to rise and fall over the banana. So, LSW came home from book club with the suspiciously pat story that my name had been drawn “randomly” to choose a book for book club in the category… micro-history. My desire to avoid responsibility warred valiantly with my much more formidable desire not to cross LSW, who can be very fierce if provoked, I tell you from hard experience. I decided that choosing a micro-history was unavoidable.When you’re travelling, every night the air is clear and crisp, the mind serene. In any case, if nobody was waiting for me anywhere, yes, this serene life would be the thing. But I’m not free, I realized; I’ve been touched by Yuichi’s soul. How much easier it would be to stay away forever. I didn't like this book. It comprises a novella (Kitchen) and short story (Moonlight Shadow), but I'm not sure how much is the book's fault, and how much can be attributed to being set in an unfamiliar culture (Japanese teens/twenties), possibly bad translation, and that although the atmosphere is contemporary, it was actually written and set nearly 30 years ago. A cousin to this genre is the micro-history on man-made constructs and other non-commodities including, but not limited to, home, cleanliness, color, reading, marriage, wives (but, interestingly, not husbands), cancer, rabies, sex, zero, infinity, rats, swearing, corpses, and many more.

Telkens als ik met hem had afgesproken gebeurde hetzelfde: dan werd ik verdrietig omdat ik was wie ik was She turns to her kitchen. But she is also invited to live with the family of a young man she has known since childhood. Now here’s a modern family: just two people, the young man and his mother. But did I tell you his father is his mother? Or, to phrase that more correctly, his mother is his father? It’s a transgender situation. The two young people are drawn to each other but then he is hit by loss. They grapple with trying to help each other, maybe love each other, or maybe just pity each other, and try to stop each other from jumping over the edge.

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Kitchen es un puñal y una venda. Te recuerda que estás solo y que tu vida tiene los días contados, pero te enseña que justo en eso se encuentra la belleza de la vida. Yosimoto es minuciosa en el tratamiento de temas escabrosos y delicados (muerte, soledad, familia, sexo…) y lo hace de manera natural, sencilla, nada soez. Y, aunque su visión es realmente pesimista, parece que al final deja un rayo de luz para la redención. La elegancia y sensibilidad niponas que admiro (Soseki, Yanizaki…) también las encuentro en Yosimoto. Su lenguaje es más actual, más directo y dialogado, pero mantiene cierta calidez, cadencia, dulzura y melancolía que me agradan. Un lenguaje sencillo, repleto de detalles de la vida cotidiana de la gente corriente, que creo aporta modernidad y frescura de autora joven al tono más tradicional de muchos de los autores japoneses. Kitchen is subsumed in grief. Each part of the story is centered around the death of one or more individuals, who through their passing have prompted the narrator and other characters to go forth on their own personal journeys of coming to grips with what has been left to them. What is missing, an absence that at first bewildered me but one that I now see as beneficial, is the pomp and circumstance that usually accompanies such events. There is no factoring in of all the usual aspects of funerals, mourning rituals, all those standards imposed upon individuals by the weight of tradition and the history of society. In a word, this story has no interest in the attempts of life to make death a thing that can not only be dealt with methods of logic, but also bureaucratic.

Maybe YAs would relate to the characters better than I did (I have no idea), but I'd be reluctant to recommend it to them because of the next problem... There were glimpses of something deeper. When overtly self-analytical, I don't think they worked, but some were genuinely poignant and thought-provoking. I’m a big fan of “commodity histories” -- books on how everyday objects and products have become interwoven into our daily lives. It's odd that while many educated Americans know the year the Titanic sank, for example, scarcely any of them know the provenance of the items on their breakfast table – the coffee in their cup or the banana sliced onto their cornflakes. And this is a shame, really, for it’s quotidian details as much as major events that shape our lives. Get expert help to overcome obesity and binge eating via private consultations with Freelee, a fruit-based nutritionist. Elevate your health and well-being with the daily attention of a world-class coach. Benefit from decades of research and experience to help you develop a plan that works. A revolutionary plan that doesn't include the traditional calorie-restriction model. Freelee uses her unique "binge on carbs" program.LSW reported that members of the book club had never heard of micro-histories. (What cave do readers like this live in?) She sold the book club on the novel idea of micro-histories by emphasizing the sub-genre of micro-histories called “commodity micro-histories”. Mark Kurlansky is a well-known and persistent practitioner of this genre with books on cod, oysters, salt, and most recently paper. There are also popular micro-histories from other authors of alcohol, milk, chocolate, coffee (at least two), tea, vanilla, eels, opium, diamonds, uranium, oranges, tomatoes, cotton, caviar, olives, olive oil, sugar, and pencils. I am so blessed to have found Freelee. Without her Free and available advice I would still be obese. Last January I weighed 210lbs. Now I weigh 145lbs and I am not afraid or obsessed with calories anymore and so I can not support a meat eating diet because most of my life none of them have worked and in one year Raw Till 4 diet worked for and Large, sweet, and, above all, cheap bananas are abundantly available in supermarkets. However, the fruit’s future is far from certain. The book De Banaan paints a picture of the world of the banana and how intensive farming systems impact the lives and well-being of humanity. ‘All things considered, the banana symbolises everything that is right and wrong in the globalisation of agriculture and the challenges our society faces: making our food production chains more sustainable,’ the preface states. stars because Zemurray's early life was fascinatingly manical and a wild ride ... but I already knew this story. I first learned of this story (Zemurray's plot in Honduras) after reading Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, and was so captivated that I spent the next year studying it extensively... I read everything I could get my hands on about bananas, Central American history and geography, New Orleans in the early 1900s, Gilded Age US politics, Great White Fleet, and Samuel Zemurray and other assorted characters in this "story". Two broken people together don’t make a whole necessarily and sometimes the narrative steers into overly sweet territory. Still the katsu don scene is *chefs kiss*, and would work perfectly in an anime.