Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

by Dan Koeppel

(New York: Hudson Street Press, 2008)

Hardcover, 281 Pages, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9781594630385, US$23.95

Part history, part science adventure: a gripping chronicle of the myth, mystery, and uncertain fate of the world’s most popular fruit.

From the Cover: To most people, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, always seedless. Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined. In other parts of the world, bananas—like rice, wheat, and corn—are what keep millions of people alive. But for all it ubiquity, much about the banana remains unknown Scientists are only beginning to understand how the world’s first cultivated fruit evolved, or where it originated. Rich cultural lore also surrounds the fruit: Evidence from ancient translations of the Bible suggests the “apple” consumed by Eve was actually a banana. In the first half of the twentieth century, governments of entire Central American nations—aptly named “banana republics”—rose and fell over the crop, as the companies now known as Chiquita and Dole conquered the marketplace. The biggest mystery about bananas today, however, is whether they will survive at all. Every banana we buy is a genetic duplicate of the next; it’s this sameness that makes the fruit so easy to grow and transport. It’s also what makes the plant so frail, susceptible to blights that can quickly wipe out an entire crop. Our supermarket banana, the Cavendish, is rapidly succumbing to such a malady: Dozens of plantations across the world have already been ravaged by the (so far) unstoppable Panama disease—and there’s no cure in sight. In this fast paced and illuminating narrative, award-winning outdoors and science writer Dan Koeppel takes us from past to present, jungle to supermarket, village to continent, into corporate boardrooms and onto kitchen tables around the world. Filled with colorful characters and startling revelations, his journey exposes the treacherous history of an iconic American business enterprise and the global quest to overcome the disease that now threatens to eradicate the fruit. Culminating with a fascinating look at the controversial intersection of food and science, Banana ultimately takes us to the high-tech labs where new bananas are literally being built in test tubes, in a race to save the world’s most beloved staple.

My Review: Whether you love them like my son does or hate them like my mother does, bananas—that ubiquitous yellow breakfast fruit—are here to stay. Or, maybe not. Perhaps, sometime in the not too distant future (the next ten to fifteen years) bananas as we know them may no longer exist.

This is yet another addition to my reading courtesy of the New Nonfiction Display at my local library. There is just something about that section of the library that grabs my attention. Of course, when the book cover has a large yellow banana on the cover and purports to tell “The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” well, then, how can anyone resist reading a book like that?

I was simply astounded by this book. It amazes me that there can be so much about a piece of fruit that is so attention-grabbing and engrossing. I mean, it’s just a banana, right? The answer is yes … but it’s so much more than just a banana. For example, did you know that bananas are technically an herb and a berry? That every banana is a clone of every other banana … every banana you have ever eaten in your life (from 1965 to the present is exactly the same, right down to the DNA). Did you know that the banana you eat now is not the same that you may have eaten if you were alive before 1965 (or if you weren’t, that it is different than the banana that your parents or your grandparents ate)? That your children may be eating a different banana in the future than the one that you and they are eating now? That there is a possibility that the banana (and not the apple) was the Forbidden Fruit eaten in Eden? It’s true … all of it. All of it and more!

Koeppel has written a sweeping and strangely engrossing history of this humble fruit, from its origins which are shrouded in the mists of time to the years of United Fruit and Standard Fruit and the banana republics of the 1940s and 1950s to the efforts today by scientists to create a disease-resistant banana so that this fruit, which has kept more people fed than rice or wheat, does not disappear from the face of the planet. It is, in actuality, a fascinating history. Ask Alisa. I practically read the entire book out loud to her, because there is so much of interest in it.

In particular, the chapters dealing with the United Fruit years are very compelling. The legacy that the banana has left in Central America and the Caribbean is sketchy at best and downright embarrassing at worst. U.S. military involvement in coups and American interference in the governments of these sovereign nations all in order to bring a banana to the supermarket paints a very sordid picture of U.S. might. If the Bush Administration has shredded the Constitution and the rights of the American people, then the Eisenhower years ones that destroyed the Monroe Doctrine and the right of the peoples of South America and the Caribbean to self-determination. In Europe the Cold War was fought on the lines between Eastern and Western Europe. In the Americas … it was fought on the banana plantations.

Little did I know that when I picked up this book that I would soon be delving in to one of the most fascinating and engrossing books I have read this year. Little did I know that there was so much to be learned about the banana (of all things). I have certainly come to have a greater appreciation for this simple yellow fruit and all that its place on my local supermarket’s shelf represents. I look at them in a much different light now, and so will you when you pick up Koeppel’s book, which I strongly urge you to do.