Author: Dan Koeppel
Review: Boston Globe
Thanks to Dan Koeppel, I'll never walk through the produce aisle the same way again.
Until I read his new book, "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World," I had never really wondered why there were myriad varieties of apple - Royal Gala, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Macoun, McIntosh, etc. - yet just one monolithic, curved sweet yellow fruit labeled simply "bananas." (Plantains don't count; they're green and you have to cook them before you eat them.)
The reason, it turns out, is that the banana as we know it is a worldwide poster child for bio-nondiversity. Known as the Cavendish, the bananas sold in my local supermarket in Watertown are virtual genetic duplicates of the ones sold at my sister's greengrocer in Los Angeles and at food markets in Tokyo, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. The Cavendish is grown everywhere from Central America to New Guinea to India to the Caribbean to Southeast Asia.
In "Banana," Koeppel, a longtime outdoors and adventure writer, weaves a multifaceted story about how the fruit's unique nature has allowed it to become a worldwide food staple and a geopolitical force that has both shaped and toppled nations.
In the hands of a lesser writer, the book's multiple personalities - it is at once a political and economic treatise, a scientific explication, and a cultural history - might have proved unwieldy. Koeppel, though, weaves all of these elements together seamlessly enough that the reader really doesn't notice. While ambitious in scope (the author takes us all the way back to the Garden of Eden to argue that the forbidden fruit of Genesis was most likely a banana, not an apple), "Banana" also comes in at a manageable 304 pages.
I found much of what was within both fascinating and disturbing, particularly the sections on the practices of large US banana-importing companies during the 20th century and on how the banana's genetic uniformity makes it susceptible to plant epidemics on a worldwide scale.
Koeppel describes how, in their day, banana companies like United Fruit and Standard Fruit were as innovative, ruthless, and pervasive as any of today's big multinationals. While the banana's enduring place in American culture has much to do with the fruit's taste and nutritional qualities, it is also a testament to the banana companies' marketing genius.
The quintessential "American" breakfast of corn flakes and bananas? Invented in a United Fruit test kitchen. Bananas as the perfect baby starter food? When the banana marketers noticed that mothers were feeding mashed-up bananas to their infants, they quickly lined up scores of medical experts to validate the practice.
Less benign, though, was big fruit's behavior in Central and South America, where it employed private armies, toppled governments with CIA help, and poisoned thousands of workers with toxic pesticides. The amount of "Yanqui, go home" sentiment in that part of the world used to puzzle me. Now I wonder why there isn't more.
Also disturbing to me was Koeppel's explanation of how the Cavendish is now threatened by disease to the point of possible extinction. Sound unlikely? Well, he explains, it has happened before.
As it turns out, the Cavendish is not our grandfather's banana. That variety, called the Gros Michel ("Big Mike"), was wiped out by the same malady, Panama disease, that threatens the bananas on our own kitchen tables. Only this time there is no substitute variety, no Cavendish, waiting in the wings. It is at this point in the book that Koeppel dons an advocate's hat, pronouncing himself in favor of genetic engineering as a way to save the banana as a modern household staple.
Personally, I could have done without the cheerleading. But even for an organic-food enthusiast like me, his arguments - like the rest of the book - were compelling enough that they made me think. And that alone is worth the cover price.
Scientific American Article:
Where would we be without bananas? The silent-movie industry, founded on images of men in bowler hats being launched into the air by banana skins, might never have gotten off the ground, so to speak. Kids would have to pack drippy citrus into their lunch boxes. The band Bananarama could have been the more fetid Apricotarota. When Shakespeare “let slip the dogs of war,” what do you think they slipped on?
I am banana-powered. When I was growing up, my daily breakfast carried the official name of “Rice Krispies, banana and milk.” Nowadays I often tuck a banana into a pocket on my cycling shirt, for a midride potassium pick-me-up. In fact, I’m taking a short break to eat a banana right now.
Okay, I’m back. (I smeared a little peanut butter on the banana, something that doesn’t work that well while biking.) What’s my lifetime banana record? According to Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, “If you are an average American, about forty years old, you’re probably approaching banana ten thousand.” So I’m probably up to about 15,000 bananas. (Because of my age? Because I’m not average? I’m not telling.)
While researching his book, Koeppel spent a week on a banana plantation in Honduras. This winter I found myself in a similar environment. On January 31, I left a message for myself on my digital voice recorder: “It’s really fricking hot.” The same heat that wilted me, however, contributed to the healthy development of hundreds of thousands of bananas growing all around me, just to the north of Honduras, on a banana plantation in Quiriguá, Guatemala. I found myself in Central America because I had been invited to speak on a Scientific American–sponsored cruise in the Caribbean. (Yes, tough job, someone has to do it.) One of the day trips available to cruisers was to the banana fields. And I wasn’t going to say nah to bananas. (The previous day I observed howler monkeys in Belize, so bananas also completed a kind of cartoon symmetry.)
Our guide, Julio Cordova, informed us that this medium-size, 80-acre plantation and packing center fills five container trucks a day. Each truck carries 960 boxes. Each box holds perhaps a dozen hands. (What we call bunches are actually referred to as hands, with each banana a big yellow finger.) In the midst of the plantation, an assembly line of a few dozen workers takes apart huge bunches—the full banana assemblage on the tree—and converts them to the boxed, plastic-wrapped hands that will wind up on your table a week after being harvested. That work, on the “fricking hot day,” truly is a tough job that someone has to do.
Some of the banana leaves showed signs of black Sigatoka, a potentially deadly fungus. Koeppel explains, however, that copper sulfate was found to cure the disease (sometimes at the expense of the workers’ health). He also shares in his book these banana tidbits: what I just referred to as the banana tree is in fact the world’s biggest herb; the fruit is actually a gigantic berry. And although more than 1,000 kinds of bananas exist around the world, most of us eat just one kind—the Cavendish. And the Cavendish, my fellow banana-enamored, is slowly dying. Another fungus, called Panama disease, is coming for it.
The killer has struck before. In fact, today’s banana is a blander stand-in for the bananas our grandparents ate, a variety known as the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike.” Koeppel explains: “It was larger, with ... a creamier texture, and a more intense, fruity taste.” But our favorite bananas are all clones of one another. (Notice how delectably seedless they are?) Which means they lack any genetic variability by which some individuals may be lucky enough to ward off a pathogen. Panama disease had wiped out Big Mike worldwide by the 1950s. The Cavendish took over and was thought to be invulnerable. But, Koeppel says, “the Cavendish had never actually been immune to the blight—only to the particular strain of the sickness that destroyed the Gros Michel.”
No one wants the song lyric “Yes, we have no bananas” to be prophetic. So we are currently in a race against time to cure the disease, genetically modify the fruit or find a whole new banana variety. Because it is impossible to envision a world lacking a fruit with this kind of appeal.
