“Fair trade bananas are produced in a different way and you can see the difference, but once you peel the skin off it’s still a great banana,” she said.
FLO International currently distributes bananas and pineapples in addition to coffee; grapes and mangoes are on the way.
E-mails have circulated around Harvard praising fair trade practices and stating that students can do their part to “peel away poverty.”
Jirmanus said she hopes students will begin to think about issues they don’t normally consider when they pick up a piece of fruit, that they will “look at bananas as an example of what’s wrong in the larger trading system.”
“We don’t just want to say, ‘Eat these,’” Jirmanus said. “We want to show students what’s wrong, what’s not fair, with conventional bananas.
“We want students to realize that they really do have a choice,” she said.
—Staff writer Wendy D. Widman can be reached at widman@fas.harvard.edu.