Read This Book

I was driving on Monday afternoon and had the radio tuned to NPR, where I heard a snippet of an interview Terry Gross was doing with Dan Koeppel, author of a new book called Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. I was entranced and I stopped the car at Barnes & Noble so I could buy the book—the sort of quick purchase that I almost never make, but in this instance was glad that I did.

I suppose that when it comes to bananas, I’ve always been the typical consumer described on the book’s dust cover, who takes for granted that bananas will always be on the grocery store shelf and never thinks about them much beyond that. Certainly, I’d never dreamed that I’d become so entranced with a book on them that I would tear through it in two days; in fact I had never considered that there would be enough information about bananas to even fill a book.

Of course, if I had thought, I would have realized that there was something strange about the fact that there seems to be only one kind of banana, whereas with every other fruit and vegetable, I’ve fascinated myself by finding and trying as many cultivars as possible. The thing is, there really are thousands of kinds of bananas out there, and we only see one main one on our shelves. It is known in the banana world as the cavendish. The plantain, according to the book, is genetically identical to the cavendish though larger and starchier—a point I am not certain I grasp and I’ll likely be trying to track Mr. Koeppel down to ask him if he can explain it to me a bit more clearly (if it’s genetically identical, why is it different). The red banana that is sometimes on the grocery shelf and that I have never sampled is a different variety—one of the few non-cavendish bananas that makes its way to the USA.

The rest of them have been rejected for widespread sale for one reason or another: either the taste is foreign to USA consumers, it has too thin of a skin to travel well, or both. All that is likely to change over the coming decades, as the cavendish banana is falling victim to Panama Disease, a fungal infection. It’s the same fungal infection that destroyed the plants that bore the bananas my parents ate as children: through the fifties, the cavendish was rejected by fruit companies for its flavor deficiencies and thin skin, but as the gros michel perished, the cavendish stepped in to fill its shoes.

And as for the fruit companies, I’d heard rumors about their misdeeds (Tulane University, where I completed by undergrad, was a beneficiary of Sam Zemurray, onetime president of United Fruit), but I hadn’t realized the extent to which they had used violence to protect their business model, nor the extent to which they have (and continue to) expose workers on banana plantation to toxic chemicals to protect the banana plants from a variety of diseases that they are susceptible to.

Also news to me were the many African nations where bananas are a subsistence crop, and the main source of nutrition. Some of the highland bananas in Uganda come in hues of orange and purple, again, according to Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.

There’s so much about the history and development of bananas and the search for disease-resistant bananas and the technologies developed by the banana companies that I obviously don’t want to spoil for you because Mr. Koeppel did a great deal of research to write it in his book. So, if you enjoy the taste of bananas, whether out of the peel (a snack that was considered scandalous in Victorian times), sliced over cereal, split with ice cream and whipped cream, in a sandwich with peanut butter, in a cream pie, otherwise, or all of the above, you owe it to yourself to get this book and read the fascinating history behind this seemingly simple snack.

7 Responses to “Read This Book”

  1. Johanna Says:

    Someone in the office was just talking about this. Hearing it from 2 different sources so close together, i guess i have to believe this is true. Damn.

  2. Xerxes1729 Says:

    I’m not an expert, or even particularly knowledgeable on the subject, but there’s more to genetics than genes. The cells in your intestines have the exact same genes as the cells in your brain, but the cells are very different. This difference comes from the fact that even though the cells have the same genes, they don’t necessarily use, or “express”, the same ones. Maybe neurons express genes A and B, and intestinal cells express genes B and C. Obviously, it’s a lot more complicated, but that’s the gist of it.

    In terms of bananas, maybe the cavendish expresses more of the enzyme that converts starch into sugar, or something like that.

  3. jwsharrard Says:

    Jo–what’s so bad about finding out about a book you should read? You spend so much time on airplanes, you’d might as well make use of it to do something other than catch up on celebrity gossip….

  4. Johanna Says:

    I’m not saying reading about a good book is bad. I’m saying the banana as we know will be gone is bad.

  5. jwsharrard Says:

    I’m somewhat more optimistic that perhaps the banana companies will rethink how they grow their fruits and we’ll see instead a wider variety of bananas available on the market, which could be a good thing.

    On the other hand, with the history behind their product that they have, the banana companies don’t really seem to be the sorts of folks who are interested in sustainable agriculture; the gist of the story is that they will do whatever it takes to grow a reliable product cheaply, human and environmental costs be damned, so perhaps my optimism is misplaced.

  6. tanya Says:

    Excellent review! I really enjoyed reading your post.
    I’ve always loved eating bananas, so I guess it makes perfect sense to just go find the book… ;-)

  7. Corduroy Orange » Blog Archive » Banana Sampler Says:

    [...] Now that I know that a banana doesn’t need to be a Cavendish, I decided to branch out the last time I was at the grocery store and give some of the lesser appreciated bananas a taste. [...]

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