May 25, 2010 — This week on History for the Future, I interview John Soluri, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of the book Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environment in Honduras and the United States(2005). Soluri describes the development of the “commodity chain” that has linked the lowland banana producing region of Honduras with the mass markets of the United States from the early twentieth-century to the present, and discusses the blurring of the division between nature and society that this process engendered. Soluri’s work pushes us to think hard about where, and under what conditions, the commodities we take for granted are produced. Take a listen to the episode, and visit the website of Building New Hope, a Pittsburgh based non-profit working with a coffee cooperative in Nicaragua, which John alludes to at the end of the program.
Add note on image source:http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/agc.7a03435/
