Banana Read online

  That doesn’t mean the Chinese crop is safe, however. A dejected Chen told me that the epidemic could only spread. “We’re going to try to stop it,” he said. “But I don’t see how.”

  TODAY, THE BLIGHT IS TEARING THROUGH banana crops worldwide. It has spread to Pakistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It is on the rise in Africa. While it has yet to arrive in our hemisphere, in the dozens of interviews I have conducted since 2004, I couldn’t find a single person studying the fruit who seriously believes it won’t.

  For the past five years, banana scientists have been trying—in a race against time—to modify the fruit to make it resistant to Panama disease (as well as more than a dozen other serious banana afflictions, ranging from fungal, bacterial, and viral infections to burrowing worms and beetles). Researchers are combing remote jungles for new, wild bananas; they’re melding one banana with another and even adding genetic material from altogether different fruits and vegetables. By the time you read this, they’ll likely have cracked the banana genome.

  The best hope for a more hardy banana is genetic engineering—work in the lab that adds DNA from one organism to another. But even if that succeeds, there’s an excellent chance people won’t want to eat and won’t be allowed to eat (such products are currently banned in much of the world) bananas that gain newfound strength from the insertion of genes originally found in everything from radishes to (and this is real) fish.

  A parallel and competing effort is underway to somehow cross the threatened bananas with a variety that has resistance to the new blight. But that’s tough, too: The resulting fruit needs to taste good, ripen in the correct amount of time, and be easy to grow in great quantities. Right now, nobody knows if the banana can—or will—be saved.

  The fate of bananas is the fate of millions. After the Popular Science article that first got me hooked on the banana hit newsstands in 2005, more people knew about the threat to their favorite fruit. But that knowledge is only the tip of the iceberg. My goal in writing this book is to show just how important bananas are—and how fascinating they can be.

  In these pages, we’ll travel from past to present, from jungle to supermarket, from village to continent, and to kitchen tables around the world. This book begins with banana myth, then moves into the ancient world, when people first brought the fruit—and themselves—out from jungles and forests and into the fields. In many parts of the world, we’ll see, the banana is what made that possible. We’ll follow the fruit as it journeys, over a period of thousands of years, across oceans, deep into continents, accompanying and sustaining people nearly every place they settled. We’ll follow the banana of the crusaders and conquistadores into the modern era. From that point, the journey becomes intertwined with politics, culture, greed, and ultimately our own lives. As the banana arrives in the present, it is endangered, and hundreds of people are working to save the fruit that millions love. We’ll see that there may be ways to preserve the banana—if we’re bold enough to embrace them.

  Ultimately, that’s what this book is about: saving the banana. It is a book about what, exactly, needs to be saved. It is science, but it is also biography and adventure story—though the details of the plot and the characters are still playing out. It searches for the ultimate solution to a crime in progress—the mortal wounding of a beloved companion—one hidden in history and science, in the immutable past, and in a future that is yet to be determined. My hope is that it does not also turn out to be forensics.

  PART I

  FAMILY

  TREES

  CHAPTER 1

  And God Created

  the Banana

  IF THERE IS AN ANSWER TO PANAMA DISEASE, it begins further back than even the earliest recorded history. It starts in myth. It starts when people—and bananas—were born.

  It is humanity’s oldest story. There’s probably not a single person you know who isn’t familiar with it. The odds, however, are also good that nobody—not you, me, or perhaps even your local pastor—has gotten it quite right.

  In the beginning, God spent a week creating heaven and earth. Fruit appeared on day two. Man arrived after the sixth dawn. After resting, God created a companion for his progeny, and Adam and Eve became a couple. Their Eden was a classic utopia. Everything was there in abundance, for the taking, with a significant exception: “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden,” God said, “but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat it, you shall die.”

  When she encounters the snake, Eve, being Eve, is easily convinced that the prohibited fruit is not poison, but a source of power selfishly guarded by God. A taste confirms it: “The tree was good for food,” the Bible says, “and a delight for the eyes.” The first woman shares with her mate, and Adam, also, doesn’t perish. Instead, the couple realizes that they’re naked, and they fashion clothes from leaves. God discovers the transgression…you know the rest. Common wisdom holds that Eve’s temptation was an apple, a piece of which lodged itself in Adam’s throat, giving that particularly male anatomic feature its name.

  The apple is so prominent in the Western world’s collective imagining of Eden that it came as quite a surprise when I learned, while researching this book, that many of the most ancient biblical texts, written in Hebrew and Greek, never identified the fruit as such. That now-common representation emerged around AD 400, when Saint Jerome, patron saint of archaeologists, librarians, and students, created the Vulgate Bible, a version of the book that united the older texts into a cohesive Latin form. Jerome’s work—conducted in Rome at the behest of Pope Damasus I—was one of the first to make scripture available to a wider audience. Over the next six centuries, other translations of the Bible began to appear. Then, in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type and published the first mass-produced edition of the Bible. Gutenberg’s Bible was a close transcription of Jerome’s millennium-old volume, in the original Latin.

  Like English, Latin is a language that contains many homonyms—words that sound alike, but have different meanings. When Jerome translated the Hebrew description of Eden’s “good and evil” fruit, he chose the Latin word malum, which, according to biblical archaeologist Schneir Levin, was intended to mean something similar to “malicious.” Malum also can be translated as “apple,” however, derived from a Greek word for the fruit, melon. When Renaissance artists referred to their Gutenberg bibles, they took the term to be a reference to the fruit—and began painting apples into their Gardens of Eden.

  NOT EVERYONE INTERPRETED the term that way, though. Over the centuries, scholars outside of Renaissance Europe asserted that the identification should have been the banana.

  Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, 1526.

  It should have been a banana.

  Among these scholars was Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy. Early in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus made two entries for the fruit in his Systema Naturae, a seminal catalogue of over four thousand species of fauna and seven thousand kinds of plant life. A deeply religious man, Linnaeus saw his work as no less than creating a complete inventory of God’s creation. He both believed in Eden and that the banana belonged there. The scientific name he gave to the sweet, yellow banana was Musa sapentium, from a Latin term meaning “wise” (as in the tree of knowledge). The green banana—our plantain—was called Musa paradisiaca, “the banana of paradise.”

  Linnaeus’s family designation for banana, Musa, derives from mauz, the Arabic word for the fruit. This makes sense, since the Koran also situates the banana in the sacred garden. There, Eden’s forbidden tree is called the talh, an archaic Arabic word that scholars usually translate as “tree of paradise” (or sometimes even more directly as “banana tree”). The Islamic sacred text describes the tree as one whose “fruits piled one above another, in long extended shade…whose season is not limited, and [whose] supply will not be cut off.” Sure enough, that description matches the concentric rings of banana bunches and the
plant’s multigenerational life span.

  But let’s swing back to the Judeo-Christian Bible, for a moment. In the Western story of Eden, Adam and Eve are said to react to their nakedness by covering themselves with “fig leaves.” Fig greenery might cover the essentials, barely. Banana leaves are actually used to make clothing (as well as rope, bedding, and umbrellas) in many parts of the world, even today. In this case, the word for the Edenic fruit isn’t mistranslated, just misunderstood: Bananas have been called figs throughout history. Alexander the Great, after sampling the fruit in India, described it as such, as did Spanish explorers in the New World. The clincher comes from ancient Hebrew. In that language, the language of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, including Genesis), notes Levin, a word for the forbidden fruit translates directly: It is called the “fig of Eve.”

  AS THEY IMAGINED EDEN, the authors of the Bible would have, most likely, drawn from the landscape around them. And what was around them? Over the centuries, there have been dozens of attempts to scientifically locate the “genuine” Eden. Some have been exercises in theological speculation (like the Mormon notion that Eden sat somewhere near St. Louis). Others try to match landmarks in the text with real geological features. In Genesis, for example, four rivers—the Tigris, Euphrates, Pison, and Gihon—are said to have bounded the paradise. The first two still exist today, flowing through Iraq and Iran. The other pair are mysteries. In the early 1980s, however, archaeologist Juris Zarins used satellite imagery to locate vestiges of two long-vanished waterways. By calculating variations in climate and terrain, Zarins concluded that the four rivers did intersect in what was once lush valley, now submerged offshore in the Persian Gulf.

  A Middle Eastern Eden could have been hospitable to bananas, and the people living there almost certainly would have been familiar with the fruit. Even today, the region is a growth center for the fruit, which is farmed in Jordan, Egypt, Oman, and Israel. Those same areas are not terribly friendly to the apple, which grows there today in limited quantities, and with the assistance of modern agriculture.

  Finally, it’s interesting to note that mankind’s true condemnation to a life of struggle doesn’t begin when Adam and Eve are cast out of biblical Eden but afterward, in the story of Cain and Abel. The brothers work diligently and, from the abundance around them, make offerings to God: Abel makes an animal sacrifice and Cain fruit. Cain’s tribute displeases God, and, angered, Cain kills his younger brother. As punishment, God condemns Cain to “till the ground,” which will “no longer yield to you its strength.” Just like farmers today, in the Holy Land and across the world, Cain was forced to struggle with weather, drought, pests, and blight. In that struggle, the first human communities sought out crops that were easiest to grow: roots (like taro, yam, and cassava) and fruit—like bananas.

  Which brings us to our next chapter, about the banana plant itself and how it lends itself to cultivation.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Banana in Your

  Pocket?

  IF YOU’VE EVER SEEN A BANANA TREE—one that is fully fruiting—you’ve likely thought to yourself, “This is the strangest plant I’ve ever seen.”

  Not just strange: almost obscene. If the banana itself has always been a crude phallic symbol, the part of the plant called the inflorescence mirrors nothing less than a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

  Inflorescence is a fancy word for a plant’s flowers and the way they arrange themselves while they’re growing. A banana inflorescence, though, is not simply the agricultural equivalent of a florist’s bouquet—it’s the part of the plant that includes the fruit (flowers, as they mature, give way to the edible part of the banana).

  The first time I saw a fully formed banana inflorescence was on a plantation in Ecuador, which grows more of the commercial version of the fruit than any other country. (Until then, I had only seen plants that had already been harvested.) It was hot out, humid. Sweat stained my shirt. I’d expected something like an apple tree: neat, in fine symmetry, with orderly fruit arranged amidst spreading leaves and branches. Instead, I saw a pendulous extremity, nearly as big as a football, extending from a thick stalk that emerged from the very top of what looks like the banana’s trunk (since the banana isn’t technically a tree, it actually has no trunk; the proper term for the plant’s central support is a pseudostem).

  The base of the inflorescence, which eventually grows into the bunches of fruit that are harvested and brought to market, holds the banana plant’s female organs. (Yes, despite the phallic symbolism of the banana, the part we eat is feminine.) The bunches are composed of “hands”—those are the sections we buy in the supermarket—which are broken into the individual “fingers” that we eat. Spirals of gender-neutral flowers pour forth from beneath the plant’s base, as well. Then comes the most bizarre-looking part of the banana plant: a heavy, teardrop-shaped bud that droops toward the forest floor, weighing down the upper part of the inflorescence the way a caught trout pulls on a bamboo fishing rod. This is the tree’s male component. Like the female equivalent above it, the male is sterile. The bud doesn’t produce pollen, as male plants usually do. The most extraordinary thing of all, to a banana innocent, is the color of the bud. A banana plantation is mostly a swath of green. But the giant buds are a deep, dark purple.

  The transformation from flower to fruit takes about six months. As the first fruit appears—tiny, green, and not much longer than a half-used pencil—it curves upward, toward the top of the tree. The fruits arrange themselves in spirals, perfectly positioned for maximum sun exposure. The arching bunches also look strange, and not just because they seem to bend the law of gravity. When we see bananas in the field, our tendency is to think that they are somehow upside down. The opposite is true. The “top” of the bananas we eat, the “pull tab” where we start to peel away the fruit’s convenient packaging, is actually the bottom. And the tiny nubbin at the banana’s opposite end is all that’s left of the flower.

  SO, IF BANANAS ARE SEEDLESS AND SEXLESS, you may now be desperate to know, where do baby bananas come from?

  Like poinsettias, lavender, and strawberries, bananas are a perennial, meaning they grow and flower multiple times over a period of years. A banana plant’s life cycle divides into two distinct stages. The “vegetative” phase comes first, a preparatory growth period prior to the inflorescence, the appearance of which marks the second, or “reproductive,” phase. The heart of the banana, and the fruit’s true stem—as opposed to the trunklike pseudostem (bear with me here)—is the corm, a bulblike part of the plant that lies under the ground. In short: the pseudostem grows out of the corm, and the leaves and inflorescence grow from the pseudostem. Bananas, like most plants, also have roots. This underground vascular system extends up to twenty feet around the plant, though not very deep, and brings it water and nutrients. The roots can also bring attackers—like Panama disease.

  A Polynesian fe’i banana in full bloom.

  It all comes down to this: One corm begets another—and a handful of corms can become a plantation. The reproductive process is accomplished via a branchlike appendage that also grows from the corm, called a “sucker.” The sucker is the essential element of banana husbandry: about a dozen emerge from a typical corm, shooting horizontally through the surrounding soil. Eventually, the new corms push aboveground, sometimes at a distance of up to five feet from the original corm, sometimes growing almost directly from it. Small plants begin to appear beneath fully grown plants. They’re genetically and visually identical, and the two are often referred to as mother and daughter. Eventually, the daughter outgrows the mother, and the cycle begins again.

  A SINGLE BANANA PLANT can produce as many as three or four harvests during its lifetime. A typical flowering Cavendish produces about a dozen hands, each with as many as twenty individual fingers (fruits). Though many plantations have modern packing and irrigation facilities, actual harvesting is still done manually. Workers chop the bunches down and haul them to central processin
g areas, sometimes on their backs, sometimes via mechanical pulley systems.

  The fingers remain green as long as they’re on the tree. But as soon as they’re cut down, they begin to ripen. Picking the fruit is a trigger for the release of ethylene gas—a simple hydrocarbon. The presence of ethylene throws a switch for a series of events that prepare the banana for your lunchbox: Acid flavors begin to mellow. Pectin (an enzyme used in jam making) content decreases, making the fruit softer. Chlorophyll breaks down. The fruit turns from green to yellow. Most importantly, starch—which makes up most of the green fruit’s physical mass—begins to transform into sugar. An uncut banana contains about 1 percent fructose. By the time it has been harvested, shipped, purchased, and is turning brown on your kitchen counter, that amount has risen to nearly 80 percent. (After that, rot and fermentation begin, at which point banana wine or beer—both popular in Africa—can be distilled. Both beverages are an acquired taste, and the taste is difficult to acquire.)