Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

It is well documented that the United Fruit Company—one of the largest banana distributors for North America in the first half of the twentieth century—used unethical practices to acquire land in Latin America for corporate-controlled plantations, but few scholars have recognized how the company also used visual images towards this end. Illustrated cookbooks, maps, and travel brochures all reveal how the United Fruit Company strategically employed a visual program to advertise bananas and the broader benefits of colonizing land and exploiting labor in “the Tropics.” Injecting this expansionist rhetoric into cookbooks and artifacts of the home was a clever strategy to market United Fruit products to American housewives, the nation’s purchasers of food and purveyors of taste. The company was also clever to model their advertisements after trends in the fine arts as a way to elevate the banana in American minds and link the fruit to visual idioms about progress and modernism. Because the company’s visual artifacts helped shape the American empire, many artists in Central America today are looking back to the visual culture of the United Fruit Company and using their art to unpack the imperialist ideologies embedded in these objects. This paper, which is drawn from my larger book project, demonstrates how leaders of the United Fruit Company carefully crafted visual images to advance a colonial agenda abroad that contemporary artists now seek to undermine.