Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.11.2013, Page 6

6The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 17 — 2013
Horticulture | Bananas?
“With the self-cer-
tainty that follows a
few beers, someone
posited that Iceland
was, in fact, the larg-
est banana producer
in Europe.”
The temperature outside hovered around 5°C, but inside the greenhouses
that dot the South Iceland town of Hveragerði, you can taste the humidi-
ty. A hotbed of geothermal activity located on a 5,000-year-old lava field,
the town has espoused the title ‘hot springs capital of the world.’ I had
come to Hveragerði to visit one greenhouse in particular, a 1,100-square-
metre tropical greenhouse and the largest banana farm in Europe out-
side of the Canary Islands. I had come to Hveragerði in pursuit of the
elusive Icelandic banana.
My first fill of Icelandic banana talk
came at a bar. Someone launched into
a conversation about Iceland’s attempt
in the early 2000s to become carbon
neutral and begin growing all previ-
ously imported produce domestically.
We talked about the near-self sufficien-
cy with which Iceland had been using
greenhouses and geothermal energy
to produce tomatoes and cucumbers
and—bananas? With the self-certainty
that follows a few beers, someone pos-
ited that Iceland was, in fact, the largest
banana producer in Europe.
The next morning I went to Bónus,
10-11 and Krónan to see if I could find
an Icelandic banana. I found only the
fruit-laden head of Chiquita stuck to
every yellow peel. I asked several super-
market employees where I could find
the Icelandic bananas. They looked
at me with expressions that said the
Icelandic banana was right next to the
grave of the Icelandic Jimmy Hoffa.
Banana banter
Before I dove into the topic with Ice-
landers again, I needed to make sure
I wouldn’t come off as completely… ba-
nanas. I found a June 2010 article in the
Christian Science Monitor titled, “Wait,
Bananas Grow In Iceland?” in which
the author and his Icelandic cohort
claimed to have seen piles of bananas
being burned outside of Hveragerði.
“That's the way it is here,” the Icelander
explains in the article. “The price of ba-
nanas has collapsed, so the farmers are
burning them to create a shortage.”
Furthermore, I discovered claims
that circa 2005, the Icelandic govern-
ment was set to begin implementing
large-scale banana production to end
the import of some 4.7 million tons of
bananas to the country each year. In
2005, Icelanders each ate about 13.5
kilos of the fruit, making them the
Western hemisphere’s number one per
capita banana consumers, according to
a report by the UN Food And Agricul-
ture Organization.
More research revealed that, in De-
cember 2006, the BBC quiz show QI
further perpetuated Iceland’s mythi-
cal banana kingdom by making it a
game-winning question. Host Stephen
Fry asked a contestant, “Which is the
biggest banana republic in Europe?”
to which the correct answer was, seem-
ingly, Iceland. This ignited a wave of
speculation in forums and chat rooms
related to the show. How could you
grow bananas in Iceland? Could you
grow a watermelon in the Sahara?
An appeal for the truth
I tested my banana research on random
Icelanders. When I asked if they knew
or believed that Iceland was producing
hoards of bananas, the response was
equal parts rejection of the claim and
slight belief that it could be true. “How
come I’m still buying Chiquita at the
grocery store?” they would ask.
“Maybe they’re not allowed to sell
the bananas,” I would counter. I had no
other explanation.
“That’s ridiculous,” we would laugh
together with nervous speculation. But
what if this was all some United Fruit
Co. driven, agricultural imperialism?
Sixty percent of the world’s bananas
come from South America. If Iceland
could begin producing bananas for
large swaths of Europe, what would that
do to the South American banana mar-
ket?
Before I retreated to a dark room to
pour over Illuminati theories and re-
watch Zeitgeist, I decided to just get
in touch with Iceland’s foremost ba-
nana expert. Her name is Dr. Guðríður
Helgadóttir and she is the head of the
Faculty of Vocational and Continuing
Education at the Agricultural Univer-
sity workstation in Hveragerði.
Within the first ten minutes of our
meeting, Guðríður cleared the air on
everything.
Behold, the truth of
the Icelandic banana
In 1885, the Icelandic Horticultural
Society was founded. By the 1930s,
the Society had discovered the ability
to heat green houses with geothermal
energy and, in the beginning, they
thought they had the potential to grow
anything this way. “Wherever there was
geothermal energy,” Guðríður says,
“people were building greenhouses.”
They were looking to grow crops
that would generate the most income
per square metre, and one crop they
were hopeful for was bananas. By the
1940s, experiments with small-scale
banana production were under way and
agricultural textbooks began to specu-
late on the future of Icelandic banana
production.
What these textbooks never went on
to mention was what Icelandic growers
learned several years into their banana
experiments that growing bananas
would never be commercially viable
in Iceland because it takes too long to
grow them with the whack sun sched-
ule. It’s too dark in the winter even
with artificial light and, in Hveragerði,
it takes 1.5–2 years to get a crop from
each banana plant compared to only a
few months in South America or Af-
rica. Large-scale production of bananas
for export was abandoned.
When Guðríður was training at an
arboretum in southern England, how-
ever, several of the staff there believed
Iceland was still cranking out sweet,
starchy fruits for the continent. In an
effort to learn more about Iceland be-
fore her arrival, they had read a book
on horticulture written in the 1940s
that claimed Iceland would be at the
forefront of European banana produc-
tion in the future. They had no reason
to believe this had not become the case.
By the late 1940s, however, most Ice-
landers who had tried to grow bananas
on their own simply gave up and do-
nated their plants to the Horticultural
College (that became the Agricultural
University) and today, the University is
still saddled with the plants. They live
in a tropical greenhouse with a few or-
ange and fig trees and the nearly one
ton of bananas grown there annually
are eaten only by students, faculty and
visitors. Because the University is gov-
ernment-funded, they are not allowed
to sell bananas for profit, but the ba-
nanas are definitely eaten, not burned.
Guðríður is used to fielding ques-
tions from speculators of the Icelandic
banana. Several years ago she got a call
from a location scout who was helping
to plan a travel show about Iceland.
He was interested in visiting one of
Iceland’s giant banana plantations. “I
told him I could show him our banana
room,” she says. Of the tropical green-
house’s 1,100 square metres, about
600–700 are for the banana plants. To
put this into scale, a ‘big’ banana farm
in Guatemala is about 100 square kilo-
metres.
Before I left the tropical greenhouse
at Hveragerði, I picked a banana right
off the plant, which is what everyone
dreams of when they come to Iceland.
Unlike me, it hadn’t crossed an ocean to
be there. It was small and sweet and its
peel was tough and in all of these ways,
perhaps it was a more fundamentally
‘Icelandic banana’ than I could have
imagined.
The Mythical Banana
Kingdom Of Iceland
Peeling back the truth of the nation’s
tropical treasure
— Alex Baumhardt
Guðríður Helgadóttir
Continues over
With Iceland Airwaves now over, may-
be you’ve just returned home from
your first trip to Iceland and you’re
trying to remember that one place
that you saw that one great band, or
maybe you’re just jonesing for another
glimpse of our damp, charming little
city. Lucky you! Iceland has finally
been Google Street View mapped,
so now you can vicariously revisit all
those hip spots you’ve been without
having to suffer the in-person beer
prices.

With all the tourists gone, you might
think that Iceland would feel a bit
empty, but not so: at 325,010 people
and counting, Iceland’s population
is on the increase, with a thousand
babies born in the third quarter of
2013 alone. And the capital is adding
to its numbers as well—following the
annual lighting of her Peace Tower
on the island of Viðey, Yoko Ono
was named an honorary citizen
of Reykjavík, only the fifth person to
be granted the title since its inception
in 1961.
Despite the tourism boom bringing
in lots of cash, Icelanders have been
seeking more creative—and nefari-
ous—ways to save, and make a little
extra cash. Take, for instance, the
news that an unknown member of
the men’s 2008 Olympic handball
team put his silver medal up for
sale at a collector’s shop in Reyk-
javík. Or the story of a rather opti-
mistic fellow in Suðurnes who tried to
convince police to help him recover
the 5000 ISK he lost in a failed drug
deal. Following the incident, police
confirmed that they do not assist
with drug deal refunds.
Meanwhile, a would-be Jón in
Reykjavík sued a teenage girl for
taking his money, but not having
sex with him. After posing as a
prostitute, the girl took 20,000 ISK
from the man and then ran off. Believ-
ing himself to have been “defrauded,”
the man took her to court. The
charges against the young woman
were dropped, and the man was later
charged with solicitation.
There also appears to be an epidemic
of employers who don’t understand
how wages work: owners of the
Bauhaus hardware store are
asking employees to pay them,
claiming that salaries have been
NEWS IN BRIEF
OCTOBER
by Larissa Kyzer