Food and the politics of food were central on Bob Edwards Weekend. Last week's broadcast included an interview with Peter Chapman, author of Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Steve Striffler offers an ethnographic exploration of the United Fruit Company in Central America in his work In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995. Striffler tells the story of how Ecuadorian peasants gained, and then lost, control of the banana industry.
Striffler is also the co-editor, with Mark Moberg, of Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Banana Wars
reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing
nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in doing so, created
unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean.
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