Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World

Front Cover
Penguin, 2008 - Business & Economics - 281 pages
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 its 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 the banana today, however, is whether it 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. -- Book Jacket.
 

Contents

And God Created the Banana
3
A Banana in Your Pocket?
9
The First Farm
15
Asia
27
Pacific
34
Africa
40
Corn Flakes and Coup dEtats
49
Bringing Bananas Home
51
27
118
Guatemala
119
Goodbye Michel
133
Cavendish
135
Falling Apart
142
Embracing the New
148
Chronic Injury
152
Banana Plus Banana
157

Taming the Wild
57
Why Banana Peels Are Funny
63
Sam the Banana Man
71
No Bananas Today
77
Man Makes a Banana
80
The Banana Massacre
84
The Inhuman Republics
90
Straightening Out the Business
93
Never Enough
97
Knowledge Is Powerless
99
Pure Science
103
A Second Front
106
No Respite
111
Brand Name Bananas
116
A Savior?
166
A New Banana
189
A Long Way from Panama 185
194
A Banana Crossroads
201
34
211
Still the Octopus?
218
The Way Out
228
40
229
A Banana Time Line
244
Bibliography
261
Acknowledgments
265
Index
269
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Dan Koeppel is a well-known outdoors, nature, and adventure writer who has written for the "New York Times Magazine," "Outside," "Audubon," "Popular Science," and "National Geographic Adventure," where he is a contributing editor. Koeppel has also appeared on CNN and "Good Morning America, " and is"" a former commentator for Public Radio International's Marketplace.

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