The banana inspector

The Club Náutico, Nautical Club, one Saturday lunchtime. A youngish couple are perched on high wooden stools at the bar. They have discovered that this is a good time and place to get into conversation with locals of all varieties (the bar and restaurant are open to everyone) and they are keen to improve their Spanish.

An older man wanders in and heads towards the bar. He is dressed casually but smartly with neatly-pressed trousers and an open-necked shirt. The young man on the stool turns towards the newcomer and smiles with recognition: ‘Good morning! We met last year. You’re the Inspector de Plátanos, the Inspector of Bananas!’

The newcomer nods affably, shakes hands with the young couple and signals the barman to bring him a glass of red wine. Then he turns back to them looking a little puzzled. ‘I’m not an inspector of bananas,’ he tells them. ‘I’m a plumber.’

He’s a plumber. Un fontanero. The young foreigner attempts to explain in his Stage One Spanish that the previous year he and his wife had conversed in this very place, at this very bar, with a man of remarkably similar appearance who came over from Tenerife regularly to inspect shipments of Gomeran bananas. In an official capacity. He was an Inspector of Bananas! Whose job was to…

…inspect bananas. Etcetera.

While this awkward scene is resolving itself, let’s turn away for a moment to fill in the background. At that time, many years ago, bananas were the island’s most important export crop. On the quayside in San Sebastián stood a long, open-sided shelter beneath which cardboard boxes full of bananas would be stacked to await collection by the banana boat.

There is a touch of magic here. There were two banana boats, both of which were painted a bright
banana yellow. I don’t know whose idea that was but what a wonderful, unnecessary piece of commercial artistry! From the cliffs above the town you could watch one of these banana-coloured boats sliding into the harbour, confident in its identity and its role, confident in its importance for the island.

The ships were nicknamed los delfines amarillos, the yellow dolphins, because they were called the Delfín del Atlántico and the Delfín del Mediterráneo. On each trip they would sail around the Canary Islands picking up bananas then carry them northwards past Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar and along the Mediterranean coast of Spain to unload at Alicante, Valencia and Barcelona.

As well as the Inspector of Bananas (I’ll get back to him in a moment) we also got to know Manuel who had spent two decades as a chef on one of the banana boats. ‘Brilliant,’ he told us. ‘I saved all my wages because at sea there’s nothing to spend your money on.’ He took a very early retirement and invested his savings in an apartment block which has given him a comfortable income ever since, without having to work at all. However, if you ever want some novel ideas for cooking with bananas, just ask Manuel.

But to return to the Club Náutico: it was me of course, the embarrassed young man, and I never again accused anyone of being an inspector of bananas, but the friendly plumber turned out to be surprisingly knowledgeable about bananas. In fact all Gomerans know about bananas. They all eat them and they all have someone in the family who grows them.

Bananas are still one of the island’s major exports, some from small family farms but mostly from large plantations in the valleys. The bunches are cut while green and wrapped in blankets like big babies to be taken to a central warehouse in La Gomera. From there they are loaded into refrigerated containers, hauled by lorry to the port in San Sebastián and onto a ferry for transport to Tenerife and then onwards to mainland Spain and the rest of Europe in anonymous container ships. It’s a less charming system than the old one but perhaps more efficient.

The plumber - let’s call him José - was unusually knowledgeable about plumbing as well as bananas. He was one of a very small number who were fully qualified to do just about anything involving pipes, even gas pipes, and a year or two later he supervised the installation of our bottled-gas water heater and cooker.

A few days after completing the work he returned with an Inspector of Gas Installations, who came over regularly from Tenerife like the Inspector of Bananas. We watched as José performed the required pressure and leakage tests under the stern gaze of the Inspector. All went well and the Inspector issued a permit for us to buy our bottled gas, then went on to his other appointments around the island, chauffeured by José who would also do all the testing.

It’s a rule of life on this little island that everyone you meet can surprise you in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a rule of life everywhere, but here there’s more time to explore it.

NOTES

for the serious student

Bananas themselves are surprising. Did you know, for example, that those huge trees live for just a single season? They grow from a tiny green shoot to a three-metre tree in a year or so, produce a big bunch of bananas then die. All over. Banana production is handed over to the next generation, which is already beginning to sprout from around the base of the old tree. As with mushrooms, there’s more going on under the soil than appears at the surface, a big root system capable of sustaining a long series of generations.

And banana trees are not even trees really, they’re herbaceous plants. The trunk is just a tightly wrapped roll of leaves, like a cigar. At the top of this pseudo-trunk the leaves break free to spread themselves luxuriously under the blue sky while from their centre sprouts a flexible stalk which will bear the fruit. It starts with a very large and strangely sinister purple flower dangling at the tip. This the male. Higher up the same stalk female flowers then sprout in huge numbers, arranging themselves in a series of rings, and beneath each flower a banana gradually forms.

The end result is a big bunch of anything up to three or four hundred tightly-nested bananas weighing something like 50 kilos, which is more than most men would want to try and lift unaided. The Canary Island variety are a little kinder to their handlers, generally being smaller and lighter than their more showy West Indian cousins. Smaller and sweeter too, which is one reason they’re so popular.

Apparently you can also eat the big purple flowers as a delicacy. You deal with them in much the same way as artichokes, peeling off the tough outer petals to reveal the tender green petals beneath and the soft heart at the centre. Eat them raw in salads, stir-fried or boiled in a stew. I haven’t tried them and I’ve never yet seen a restaurant in La Gomera offering them on the menu. A big opportunity for one of our more adventurous chefs.