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.

Tian Harter
I gave my copy to some old friends that live in San Mateo County, California.