US Banana Companies, Wheat Flour Imports, and Changes in North Coast Honduran foods

US Banana Companies, Wheat Flour Imports, and Changes in North Coast Honduran foods

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

Dr. Taylor Mack in his doctoral thesis on Trujillo and its Hinterland notes that the Spanish of Trujillo during the colonial period were very dependen ton food imports.  Elizeth Payne in her study of Trujillo merchants in the 19th century in Trujillo hacia su melancolico abandono, notes that Trujillo merchants still had to import food. This is because what the Spanish residents of Honduras wanted to eat and what the Honduran Catholic church needed for mass—olives, olive oil, grapes for grape wine, and especially wheat flour would generally not grow in Honduras and definately would not grow in Trujillo.

The early Spanish conquistadors had  not immediately grasped this basic fact.  They did try repeatedly to grow wheat and even strawberries in Trujillo. This did not work. One of the reasons that no one today really knows how much land is included in a colonial or19th century land title of say 7 caballerías in Honduras, is that a caballería was defined by law as the amount of land  needed to grow 100 fanegas of wheat and was given to the gentlemen on horses during the conquest (cabelleros) as opposed to peonarías which were given to Spanish soldiers on foot, also measured in how much wheat the land would produce.

 As no amount of land on the North Coast would grow wheat, the Spanish apparantly claimed as theirs the amount of land they wanted to for a land grant of  7 caballerías.  In the 19th century and as late as the 1940’s I have seen complaints about how the Honduran Indians have land in equally hot places like the Comayagua valley, but they are not being productive with it such as they were not using it to grow wheat.

In the 19^th century, the US replaced Europe as the principal supplier of wheat flour to Honduras. US captains  brought down wheat flour almost as ballast to have something in the hold of the ship going down, while they brought Honduran hardwoods back to the US.  These 19^th century shipments seems to have been destined for a very small group of consumers, as even in the 1980’s there were whole departments of Honduras where you could not get a piece of bread, as everyone ate only tortillas or similar corn based breads like totopostes (a Lenca hard corn bread now largely displaced by tortillas) or rosquillas. Travellers through San Pedro Sula consistently mention in the colonial period and  in the middle of the 19^th century, almost the only thing available to eat there was plantains.

A Conumdrum Caused by US Banana Companies on the North Coast

When the US banana companies began building whole new towns and cities around their banana plantations and banana exporting ports in Honduras in the early 20^th century, they had a logistics problem for their company stores. The people from the Honduran and El Salvadoran Interior who came to work on the Honduran  North Coast were used to eating tortillas two or three times a day, and tortillas were made from ground white corn, and the grind for tortillas is different from the grind for corn meal such as for US corn bread recipes. In the South of the United States, most southerners used white corn meal for things like grits and corn bread,  Hondurans also tend not to like corn meal made of yellow corn.  Corn for tortillas and tamales should also be nixtamalized (cooked with lime or ashes, needed to release a B vitamin and certain proteins in the corn), and US corn meal was generally not nixtamalized, which is why there was such a problem  of plegara of epidemic proportions  in the US South at the time.

In the 19^th century reports of the North Coast, and still today many North Coast Hondurans will not eat breakfast until 10 am.   This might be a continuance of the Nahua speaker practices that they only ate two meals a day, the first at 10 am, after one was hungry. They taught moderation in eating, and one way one was moderate was to only eat two meals a day.  Complaints of 19^th century travelers that they wanted something else besides coffee before 10 am  went unheeded by their Honduran hosts.

How to combine Honduran employee eating habits with US banana company desired work schedules and how to physically get enough grain to the North Coast of Honduras to feed an extra 100,000 people or so, attracted to the area by the banana companies and the assorted opportunities they offered? The local people living on the North Coast like the Garifunas, the Miskitos, the Black English speakers, the Jicaque Indians were all generally peoples who ate a combination of banana and plantain type crops and  root crops like yuca, yams, malanga, etc. and so the locally available amount of corn was almost non-existent and it was 3-5 days by mule to the nearest areas where corn did grow. 

The fact that most ethnic groups native to the North Coast have almost no known recipes for corn, own none of corn processing tools that the Ladinos use, and corn and beans do not grow particularly well directly on the North Coast, both for problems of poor soil quality and cycles of excessive rain, is not taken into account still today by groups like the UN Food Program which provides corn and bean for the school snack program and Food for Work programs after Hurricanes and Agricultural programs for Garifunas and Miskito Indians which encourage rotating crops like beans and corns. One Garifuna school I know if they get corn to be fed to the students, they send it home with the children to be fed to the chickens.

One Solution—The Wheat Flour tortilla for Baleadas

The United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company actually found it easier to import wheat flour from the US and get their workers to learn to make wheat flour tortillas than to get sufficient amounts of white dried corn from the Interior of Honduras to the North Coast. Thus was born what is now a regional breakfast food on the North Coast of Honduras the baleada. 

A baleada is made with a wheat flour tortilla, a smear of refried beans and a little of Honduras’s dry white cheese known just as “queso” (cheese).  They are better hot, but it is possible to take a baleada with you and eat it cold. Although Honduran Spanish has the word “sandwich” and the plural “sandwiches” most Hondurans still today have not ever eaten a sandwich and if they have they do not feel like they have eaten a meal.

It is possible to jazz up a baleada with scrambled eggs, or avocado, or a little sausage in the eggs.  In San Pedro Sula and Tela, baleada stands open in the morning on the street to serve this type of breakfast.  In Honduran stores, except in areas of Garifunas and Bay Islanders, they generally do not sell cake flour, but rather flour specially ground to make light and fluffy baleadas. The wheat tortillas for baleadas are not similar to wheat tortillas bought in Mexican food  sections in the US which tend to be large and quite thin. A baleada tortilla is only slightly larger than a corn tortilla and is somewhat puffy.

The meal eaten by Hondurans in the middle of the day (or sometimes as late as 4 pm if they follow the 10 am breakfast schedule) is properly called in Honduran Spanish “almuerzo”. However, people also talked about taking a baleada for their “lonch”, and to carry your “lonch” you could use a “lonchera” (lunch box).  This replaced the string bag and the flask made of the tecomate bottle gourd which Honduran peasants traditionally used to carry their chicha corn beer and their tortillas with salt which they took out to their fields. They said they took chicha corn beer in part because it gave them strength and energy  to work, but also because water was available in nearby streams if they wanted water to drink. The Lencas also felt that corn related agriculture was sacred, and so one drank a corn based drink to put one’s mind in a clean place to be in the right mind set to plant. (Catholic priests tended to see this as permanently drunk peasants).

Replacing Chicha Corn Beer as the most Common  Drink of Choice

Chicha is illegal to sell under Honduran law which was done so that the Honduran government got the taxes from the sale of beer and “guaro” a cheap rum that the Honduran government gave certain Honduran families a monopoly to make.  In the banana camps, in addition to legal beer (made by a subsidiary of the banana companies), and “guaro”, contraband whiskey brought in by the Garifunas from  Belize and home distilled corn whiskey (borbon in the US) known locally as “cususa”, also often made by Garifunas, small amounts of chicha corn beer, and Coca Cola type carbonated soft drinks (gaseosas) were available.

Banana Companies Offered New Places to Drink

 A US banana company had the license to bottle  Coca Cola  in Honduras as well as a local brand of soft drinks (Tropical).  During the Truxillo Railroad period there was also a gaseosa or carbonated soft drink factory in Trujillo which closed as the Truxillo Railroad   began to close. The Truxillo, the TelaRailroad, and the Standard Fruit had clubs for their workers. In the Trujillo-Puerto Castilla area there were separate clubs for whites, for Black English speakers, for Garifunas, and for Hispanics.

 Besides drinks, these clubs also provided movies from time to time, introducing Caribbean and Mexican  music to Honduras. While in parts of Honduras like Tegucigalpa tango which they learned about through these films became all the rage, in their “music to remember” (musica de recuerdo) dances the Garifunas  dance the cha cha cha, but not the tango. In fact the Spanish verb tangear in Iriona among the Garifunas means to dance the Garifuna dance hunguhungu or fedu before Christmas, for example in Iriona they say Hoy vamos a tangear. while in Trujillo they are more likely to say Vamos a fedujar.

Garifunas remember the Black English speakers playing a lot of jazz, including playing for example Nat King Cole songs during funeral marches. Some Garifunas in the banana towns, like Antonieta Maximo’s father in La Lima also became jazz fans at the time, and some Garifunas even  learned to play jazz. When the Saints Go Marching In played on a saxophone by a Garifuna is still a popular song for a number of different occasions in Trujillo, like to accompany the procession of St. John the Baptist the patron saint of Trujillo.

Dr. Alfonso LaCayo, the first Garifuna doctor needed to earn money to go to high school in the late 1930’s so he learned to play jazz and tried playing in an orchestra at night while he went to high school during the day, reported his daughter Gloria LaCayo in her book on him. He could not keep up with his studies because he was tired from being up all night, and had to find another way to earn money to attend high school. In Puerto Castilla during the Truxillo railroad time reportedly there was a jazz band The Banana Six. Into the 1950’s, there were still hotels that did not let Blacks stay in them, such as Hotel Tela in Tela and a hotel in La Lima, and it was until the 1960’s that the whites only club Club Alpha in La Lima accepted Black employees of the Tela railroad as members. The Cocopando restaurant in Barrio Cristales, Trujillo was built by its original owner because he tried to go to a party in the center of Trujillo, and was turned away because he was Black (Garifuna).

Flour Foods Among other North Coast Groups

The Glynn family who still own SuperTienda Glynn and Hotel O’Glynn  in Trujillo, and who during the time of the Truxillo Railroad Company were also their representatives to get their railroad concession (Johnny Glynn’s grandfather), the American Consul in Trujillo, the principal providers of milk to Trujillo and Puerto Castilla and according to the research of Elizeth Payne also had the distributorship for Honduras for Pillsbury Flour.

Coconut Bread- This is similar to US white bread except it has coconut milk in it. It is made by Garifunas and Bay Islanders. It can be made as little rolls or as loaves of bread appropriate for cutting bread for sandwiches. The Miskitos like coconut bread and if they have cash they will buy it as a treat, but I am not sure if many Miskito women actually know how to make coconut bread and  their access to white wheat flour is more limited than the Garifunas and the Bay Islanders . Garifunas in Trujillo will now often eat a coconut bread in the evening and call it dinner, since their heavy meal is traditionally at lunchtime.

Coconut Cake made by Garifunas is similar, but is denser, and is small and round.

Pan de camote,  pan de yuca, pan de guineo maduro, pan de ayote, pan de arroz, pan de maíz—in Bay islands English Sweet potato bread or cake, yuca bread  or cake,  ripe banana bread or cake, pumpkin cake, rice bread or cake, corn bread or cake. In the other   Caribbean countries this is known as pone, like cassava pone is pan de yucca in Honduras. Some linguists think that the Caribbean English word pone comes from the Spanish word pan for bread. In Honduras these are made by the Garifunas, the Bay Islanders and the Miskito Indians. There is only a little wheat flour in them, their consistency is more like a custard.  They are the thickened baked form of Atols or puddings or porridges that all three of these groups also make of the same ingredients. While the Hispanics of Honduras make atol out of corn, somehow the isolated Tawahkas deep in the rainforest of Olancho and the Mosquitia learned to make atol de harina de trigo (porridge of wheat flour) which is made of white flour, salt, and water, and  has minimal nutritional value.

In Eastern Africa these types of thick and  thin porridges which in Honduras are made with coconut milk, cane sugar from blocks (rapadura), cinnamon, nutmeg, and the above ingredients mashed in a wooden mortar also seemed to have been common.  In Southern Africa the name for thick and thin corn porridges(always made with white corn, not yellow) is pap, which is also the Black English speaker word for these foods in Honduras.

The way the Garifunas and  the Black Bay islanders cooked these foods were different. Black English speakers dug a hole and put afire to make coals under the pot. Then they would put the mixture in the cast iron skillet and put it in this hole which they called “fire hearth”.  They left it to cook. In crowded and mixed ethnic group port towns like Puerto Cortes, according to Sabas Whittaker, the Black English speaking women had to hide where they were cooking, as reportedly some of the naughty boys would see that if they lifted the lid and peed in it, would the cook notice when she came back to get the food.

The Garifunas would bake their breads at home, with a fire on top of a “lamina” a piece of corrugated zinc covering the pumpkin bread or whatever in the cast iron skillet. Now Garifunas and Bay Islanders cook these type of cakes in a gas oven with aluminum cake pans. Bay Islanders call these types of cakes “pot cakes”, while the type of cake Americans think of for birthdays and which the Bay Islanders often make from Duncan Heinz cake mixes are called “lite cakes” in Bay Islands English.

Traditionally Bay Islanders made pot cakes and lite cakes on Saturday, so they could go to church on Sunday and come home and eat cake and then go back to church in the evening. Lite cake was also traditional for Christmas and  New  Years among the Bay Islanders, and the Garifunas have picked  that up, replacing the older Garifuna cakes for those days like corn cake and pumpkin cake. (There is such a thing as an African pumpkin, and the East Africans used cinnamon and nutmeg in East Africa for centuries before Europeans arrived through the trade route carried by the Arabs to India and the Spice Islands and  in this way the use of coconut milk also spread to Eastern Africa).  

Semitas-While Afro-Honduran groups on the North Coast generally eat coconut bread, for breakfast many Ladinos now eat wheat flour breads like the sweet semitas or regular rolls (bolulos).  It is interesting that the traditional bread of Turkey is called semite, and the immigration of Arabs from the old Ottoman Empire to Honduras may account for the name of this bread.  It is also sold in pulperías in Garifuna neighborhoods like Barrio Cristales. Ladinos also consider pound cake (pan dulce) and plain vanilla cookies (pan) as bread and will often eat them for breakfast also. As Honduras produces no wheat itself, when the Lempira is devalued, one of the foremost questions in people’s minds is how will this affect the price of wheat breads for breakfast and will poor Ladinos be able to eat breakfast? Ladinos also learned to eat pancakes and Corn Flakes with hot milk on the North Coast and  it is considered  higher class to eat pancakes than beans, corn tortillas, eggs, plantain, avocado for breakfast, which is about a thousand times more nutritious as I tell my Home Economics students at the UPN.

Tikini- The second most common soup base for Garifuna soups is called tikini, in which some flour is burnt until brown with some oil or shortening (Manteca),then water is added, and then the other ingredients like blue crabs, for blue crab soup.

This type of use of wheat flour may replace a use of other African type flours like yam flour in Garifuna cooking.  Although older Garifuna women when they give the list of what they used to grow usually name yams (ñames) first, ñames are currently scarce in Trujillo as most Garifunas have abandoned farming there and most Ladinos who bring in food to sell in Trujillo do not know how to grow ñames. Some Ladinos who do grow ñames try to be the first to bring ñames to market in the spring, but in fact they bring them before they have totally finished ripening and give people who buy them  a stomach ache. You have to let name leaves totally dry out and die before you harvest the white ñames, and this is never before Holy Week.    Although I have read in books about African agriculture that yams produce all year long, but that is not true of the variety grown by Garifunas, that there is just a couple of week window in April when the fresh fine white yams are available.

If the Garifunas ever knew how to make yam flour they have forgotten. They did know how to make banana flour for the porridge known as konkontee among Black Bay Islanders (the word is from Ghana)  and  pluplumaña among Garifunas and was also made by Miskito Indians and mulattos in Honduras, but these groups seldom if ever make this porridge now.  Making flours like cassava flour, banana flour, plantain flour, and yam flour were conservation techniques to permit that these products were available in time of scarcity during the year or when fresh was not available like during and immediately after hurricanes when paths to fields are still flooded. Failing to continue traditional conservation techniques like flours, fermented buried bananas (Miskitos only), and dried and salted or smoked fish makes the populations more vulnerable as far as food security, such as after hurricanes.

Fulblow (Garifuna wheat flour tortillas with shortening and coconut milk in them) I have never met a Garifuna who knew how to make a corn tortilla,although they now sometimes buy them from Ladina girls, but it is not uncommon for them to make from time to time Garifuna style wheat tortillas called Fulblow. These are larger and thicker than Honduran wheat tortillas.  They are usually an accompaniment for soups, and are not served with anything in them.  They replace Garifuna style breads like the thin cassava bread and the thicker marrote which are also served with soups and dipped in them. Garifuna meals are often divided into something like a soup or a stew, and then something starchy known as the “Bastimento” (the thing that will make you feel full, from ya basta I have had enough I am full)  and this is a wheat flour type of bastimento.

Beili-This is a mixture of water, flour and salt, and made into a large sheet of dough and boiled, like you were going to make noodles or spatzel and then did not cut it.  It is another type of Bastimento. It is considered traditional, and is served at ancestor ceremonies like gusirigayu (the ceremony done one year after a dugu to finally send the ancestor spirit back to the land of the ancestors) because the ancestors would have eaten it and want to remember it. I have not met anyone who still makes it for day to day eating. Instead spaghettis have become popular with modern Garifunas, and are also commonly served  to the ancestors at ancestor ceremonies like the banquet for the ancestors, a chugu. The ancestors also commonly get soft drinks (gaseosas) and beer besides “guaro” and traditional yuca beer “hiyu”.

Pasteles-These are small pies with wheat dough on the outside. While Ladinos make pasteles with meat and rice inside often in a spicy corn tortilla crust outside, the most common type of pasteles in Trujillo among the Garifunas is shark meat filled pasteles which are sold about 10 am in time for the traditional North Coast breakfast.  The Garifuna men who fished used to give away shark meat, a way of helping keep fed vulnerable populations like old people and orphans. Now the Garifuna fishermen feel forced to charge for shark meat due to the lack of other fish and the high cost of living, but they still sell shark meat and the meat of the sting ray (raya) at a lower cost than other fish.

The issue of not being used to having a breakfast ready early also affected Garifuna school children, whose classes start at 7 am. Before the Garifuna Emergency Committee started the children’s breakfast program they asked what the mothers fed their children now before sending them to school. If they gave them anything (a significant number  fed  their children nothing in the morning as they had nothing ready so early in the morning) , others said  they often gave them Kool Aid and white coconut bread  to eat before school, a combination  that has almost no nutrition. The children in both cases had  poor results in school due to low energy and poor concentration.

Currently the majority of the older Garifunas in Trujillo suffer from diabetis and  high blood pressure and are overweight and so feel a lot of arthritis in their knees. The changes in their diet, to a lot of white refined flour, commonly drinking soft drinks or other drinks sweetened with sugar, and abandoning or not having access to a lot of traditional foods some of the teas of which were medicinal and nutritional, plus less exercise as they have mostly abandoned agriculture, would go a long way to explain why they say older Garifunas before were healthier and lived longer.  Buying food instead of producing it, also affected their families’ economic situation  in many ways, including many seeing no way out except for some of them to immigrate either to the big Honduran cities or to the US.