Written by Brian Shea
Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Walking through the supermarket, it might be easy to take the bunch of bananas you put in your shopping cart for granted, but for Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, the banana has an interesting and sometimes sordid history.

Mr. Koeppel recently spoke at the Wilton Library about his book and a trip to the Congo he took in search of a rare hybrid banana that both tastes good and is resistant to a disease that has felled banana breeds in the past. But before talking about the trip, Mr. Koeppel gave a brief history of the banana as we know it today.

“If you were born after 1960 and have spent most of your life in the United States … this Cavendish banana is the only one you’ve eaten,” said Mr. Koeppel, holding up a banana.

Mr. Koeppel said the banana represents an interesting paradox; while it needs to be transported from thousands of miles away, it is the cheapest fruit in the supermarket. He said part of the reason for this is that only one breed of banana is grown and sold here and thus the conditions for transporting it are the same for all bananas, as opposed to a fruit like the apple with many different varieties.

The banana is also cheap to produce and has cheap labor, Mr. Koeppel said. And over the years, the banana companies have taken pains to ensure that their product remains cheap by getting representation in banana growing countries via revolution. He said the governments of Panama and Colombia, for example, had been overthrown by banana companies in the past.

“Chiquita had the power to overthrow governments as late as 1954,” said Mr. Koeppel. But unfortunately for the banana companies, other factors have interfered with their business over the years, such as the onset of Panama disease in their product. Panama disease is a fungus that not only kills bananas but prevents them from being grown in the same place again.

The Gros Michel was the original breed the banana companies used to ship to the United States, but when Panama disease wiped out whole banana plantations, the companies needed to find a new banana. And that’s where the Cavendish came into play.

Mr. Koeppel said the Gros Michel banana tastes better than the Cavendish and the only good quality of the Cavendish is its resistance to Panama disease. Out of thousands of varieties of bananas, Mr. Koeppel said the Cavendish is the only one that the banana companies have judged to be commercially viable.

And now even the Cavendish is threatened. Mr. Koeppel said in Malaysia, banana plantations have been hit by a mutated strain of Panama disease that has been killing Cavendish bananas.

“It is completely incurable,” said Mr. Koeppel of the disease. He said the disease has now spread to Australia but hasn’t hit Latin America yet, the place where most of the United States’ bananas come from. But according to Mr. Koeppel, it’s only a matter of time before it gets to Latin America, and when that happens it’ll be chaos for the banana industry.

“Panama disease is coming. There’s no doubt about that,” said Mr. Koeppel. “One clump of dirt could infect all of Latin America.”

As part of a National Geographic assignment, Mr. Koeppel headed to the Congo to look for a banana that might prove both tasty and resistant to Panama disease. A town at the mouth of the Congo River is where the word for banana comes from, and Mr. Koeppel said even today bananas account for 90% of the caloric intake of people in parts of the Congo.

Once there, Mr. Koeppel went looking for a Belgian lab that did research on bananas when the Belgians controlled the country. What he found was much more interesting than a lab.

“It wasn’t a lab; it was a city of scientists in the middle of the jungle,” he said. He mentioned banana gardens there and an effort by the Belgians to thoroughly categorize all the bananas. Though those records still exist, that effort came to an abrupt halt when the Belgians all left out of fear when it became clear the Belgian government was pulling out.

He said with many different varieties of bananas there, there were very few problems with banana diseases.

“What was proven, inadvertently, is the banana diversity mantra was proven,” said Mr. Koeppel. “A lot of people say diversity, in addition to genetic manipulation, is important to saving the banana. But at this point, no one has been willing to invest” in that theory, he added.

He said the discovery that a diverse sum of banana breeds leads to fewer banana disease problems was important to the survival of the fruit, and that additional expeditions to the Congo would be important for further research.

An audience member asked if genetic engineering, which has also been proposed as a solution to the banana disease problem, was dangerous. Mr. Koeppel said he didn’t think so, but with people afraid of genetically manipulated foods in general, it was important to educate people about the process.

Information: bananabook.org