Ch. 4-5 Stuffed and Starved

Whether it be eating a banana or drinking a cup of tea, I never imagined that these things that I can find at a grocery store for a couple of dollars carried such an intense history. Patel still manages to surprise me with information that absolutely blows my mind and statistics that just makes me think “holy crap”. Sipping a cup of tea, the fact that this warm caffeinated cup had given rise to an entire empire is a thought that never would have crossed my mind. Tea was a pick me up and a nutritional punch to the body made cheap which is ideal for a working person on the go for a long period of time. As consumers however, we want to enjoy our products and thus sugar and milk was introduced to tea by the British. It gave sweetness and hides the bitterness of tea. A warm drink that gave energy for the day that taste delicious, who wouldn’t want that? Unfortunately, tea and sugar were not home grown for the British and obtaining these goods would have to come from another source like China and India for tea and the Caribbean for sugar. Britain had dominion over both of these regions, how lucky! Tea gave urban workers to get through the working day. It truly is “the genealogy of the can of Red Bull”. It amazes me how a simple good of today had such an effect in our history and have such an influence in international trade.
Finding out that a simple banana had such a blood stained history left me appalled. The United Fruit Company had connections with the higher ups and used it for their own benefits. Accusing Arbenz Guzman of becoming a communist because of his plan to buy unused land from the United Fruit Company to give to landless peasants at the price the United Fruit Company declared it to be is way out of line. The United Fruit Company decided to take a sprint past that line and initiated a CIA operation in Guatemala that caused a war took over 200,000 lives. “The complicity of the United Fruit Company in Central American poverty has rarely been acknowledged in the US. It is a history that has been erased.” The fact that such an event has erased from the world is unjust. Companies have the right to make money but taking extreme actions like this is unnecessary. The fact that Guzman was just trying to provide land to the landless makes it all the worse. “Such countries are known not as victims of empire, but as ‘Banana Republics’.” It's going to be tough to cross a Banana Republic store in a mall without feeling a little disgusted from now on.