AN A-PEELING STORY

Temple is America’s cheapest city for buying bananas

DAVID STONE | OUR TOWN TEMPLE

Temple goes ape over a good banana, and rightly so. After all, it’s the cheapest city in America to buy the tasty cavendish.

For the past five years, the Council for Community & Economic Research has placed Temple at or near the top of the prestigious list in their quarterly Cost of Living Index, and this is the third time in five years that Temple ranked No. 1 in banana costs.

At the end of 2022, bananas averaged 45 cents per pound in Temple, well below the national average of 63 cents. Since the average pound consists of four bananas, the local average price of a single banana is just over 11 cents, according to numbers supplied by the Council.

According to the folks at MoneyLemma, Friar Romas de Berlanga, the same Spanish Catholic missionary who discovered the Galapagos Islands, introduced bananas to the New World in 1516, and over the years they have become to top agricultural commodity in many Central and South American countries.

More than 95 percent of bananas sold in the US — and Temple — come from Central America, but bananas first thrived in rainforests of Southeast Asia.

Bananas were first imported to the US in 1843 and sold for 25 cents each, which was a high price back then and more than double the 2022 price in Temple. In today’s dollars, that quarter piece of fruit would cost more than $5 today.

Yep, despite today’s widespread inflation and shipping issues, bananas are still a bargain, especially in Temple.

Speaking of shipping, entire fleets of trains and boats were specially equipped for moving bananas to the US, Canada and other countries, according to MoneyLemma  Shipping is a priority for banana companies because their product has such a short shelf life — two weeks. Once a bunch is cut off a tree, they have about two weeks to ship it at least 2,000 miles to distribution centers in the US.