5:52:30How Bananas Started A Global Power Struggle (The Banana Wars) | Boring History For Sleep
A six hour black screen sleep broadcast that tells five complete histories back to back, and the banana is only the first. It follows the fruit from cloned wild plants in New Guinea through Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker's 160 penny bunches, Minor Keith's Costa Rica railway, the United Fruit Company's scrip towns and Great White Fleet, Samuel Zemurray's 1911 private coup in Honduras, the 1928 Ciénaga massacre, the 1954 CIA coup against Árbenz over Decree 900, Panama disease killing the Gros Michel, the rebrand to Chiquita, and Tropical Race 4 now stalking the clonal Cavendish. Then it drifts through 500 million years of the jellyfish (mostly water, no brain, microsecond stinging cells, a polyp and medusa double life, survival through the Great Dying), one ordinary week of a 1920s working woman the world called a flapper, the roads, terraces, quipus and vertical archipelago of the Inca Empire before and after Cajamarca, and a day stranded in a late fourteenth century English village where you cannot understand a word of Middle English and the myths about filth, water and bland food all turn out wrong.