Making the Exotic Ordinary

摘要

Minor Cooper Keith was twenty-three years old when he came to Costa Rica to build a railroad. Because of what grew besides the tracks, he stayed more than fifty years. The story starts in 1871. The government of Costa Rica had contracted with Keith's ailing uncle to connect its capital city to Caribbean ports by train. In short order, the uncle died and the country defaulted on its payments. Soon the Brooklyn-born Keith owned a half-built, passenger-less boondoggle. To supply paying cargo both inland and back to sea, he planted bananas along his 800,000-acre easement. Wrapped in tinfoil and sold for ten cents, bananas were at this point in America's history a novelty product described in a late-century guide to housewives as tasting "something like muskmelons. "How to eat the fruit? "Boil them two or three minutes in a little water, with a teaspoon of sugar." Historian Virginia Scott Jenkins outlines the consumer market Keith would change forever." In the nineteenth century the people of the United States loved fruit and enjoyed many varieties of domestic fruits and berries," she says, "but some Americans were wary of imported fruit." One taste of the banana, however, and they were hooked.