[Sosfbay-discuss] [Book Review] Banana by Dan Koeppel

[Tian Harter]

Banana is a well researched book about the history of humanity's fourth
most widely eaten food (after wheat, rice, and corn). The story goes
back more than 7,000 years, when bananas became the first agricultural
crop. Every chapter has lots of startling information, ranging from how
this fruit that has no seeds reproduces to how something with a short
shelf life gets from tropical fields to local store and is widely eaten
for often less than a buck a pound.

There are many surprises on the pages. One is that the vast majority of
the bananas sold in the USA are genetically identical. This is mostly
because the plant is reproduced by digging up roots with a "corm"
segment and planting them elsewhere, something like growing from a
cutting. Because of this every banana plant is vulnerable to the same
diseases, meaning that a serious banana plague would change a lot of
peoples eating habits.

There is also a lot of history in the book. Early on the banana spread
around the Pacific because Polynesian sailors would carry corms with
them and plant them when they found land. Koeppel argues that the fruit
Eve gave Adam was likely a banana. Apples didn't grow in the area. More
recently Banana Republics were founded and exploited by fruit companies
because of the huge demand they were able to develop for the fruit.
There are such tidbits as the Columbia banana massacre of 1929 in which
thousands of striking workers were killed was first widely learned about
from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There is also discussion of how bananas work differently in different
parts of the world. Places where bananas are grown and eaten locally,
they are a big part of most peoples diets. In tropical Africa most homes
have banana plants, and there are thousands of varieties. In India it's
more of a farmed crop, but there are also lots of different varieties
grown and used. It's only in the north that they are imported from
banana republics which grow them on huge monocultured plantations. The
author argues that the best thing we can do to improve the working
conditions there is to only buy fair trade bananas. He salutes
Switzerland where almost half of the bananas eaten are fair trade
bananas for being the most progressive country on the planet in this
respect.

A large part of the book is devoted to the problem of plant diseases
that can kill an entire plantation if it can kill one plant and spread
from there. The author lists three or four dangerous banana diseases
that the plantations are battling with chemical warfare. There are
people working to breed new varieties of banana, but the odds are
comically stacked against the effort by the no seeds problem. There are
also people working to develop new banana breeds by genetic engineering
methods. They seem to be having some success, but have not yet come up
with a replacement for the yellow banana all Americans see over and
over. I'm left with this feeling that the entire banana section of the
supermarket could disappear if we aren't lucky or the growers do the
wrong thing.

I enjoyed reading this book. My biggest complaint is that I wish he'd
attacked the problem of monoculture by looking for ways to diversify the
banana crop instead of looking for a new perfect banana. Maybe that's
because without those tremendous economies of scale the party's over and
the author realizes that. Anyhow, having read it I feel like I know a
lot more about this fruit. If you want to read my copy, let me know.
First responder gets it!
-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
Happy Blue Moon New Year!