Banana Read online

  The result today is both variety and confusion. Across the globe, people grow different kinds of bananas (though they fight the same kinds of banana diseases). The more modern a banana is, the easier it is to determine where it came from (the origin of every banana grown in our hemisphere is well-known, since they are recent arrivals and there are few varieties); the older it is, the more difficult.

  In sorting through the stacks of reports, maps, and stories I’d acquired about the fruit, I was able to get a broad sense of the banana’s course of expansion throughout the world—a journey that ultimately carried it (and me), across continents and millennia, from the banana’s ancient past to its entrance into American history books.

  BEFORE THE EARLIEST FARMERS began cultivating bananas, the fruit grew wildly in the lonely masses of forest that stretch from South China into Southeast Asia and on to India. Even today, there are more indigenous banana species in that region than anywhere else. Some of the fruit grow in the Himalayas, as high as six thousand feet. Others are found in deep jungle.

  Because there were so many early varieties of the fruit in Asia, the number of cultivated bananas that have evolved from them reaches into the hundreds. All are closely related. Some are meant to be cooked; others are eaten raw. At a single marketplace, you might find yellow and green bananas alongside orange, brown, and magenta ones. If banana consumers were as enthusiastic and inquisitive as wine lovers, a tour of Asia’s groceries and plantations would be the equivalent to a visit to Bordeaux or the Napa Valley. But most of these fruit you and I will never taste, because—like their feral counterparts—they often have a very limited range.

  A few years ago, I vacationed in North Vietnam. I ended up on Cat Ba Island, a national park that sits in Ha Long Bay, at the edge of the South China Sea. There are a few towns on the Manhattan-sized island, but the interior is mostly rain forest growing around a series of undulating karst mountains that jut above the trees. A path winds across the center of the island, through forests of thick vines and spiny rattan palms. After a long day of hiking, my group and I finally emerged at the village of Kim Ngan. At sea level, the island is humid and oppressively hot. As we entered town, several residents greeted us, pointing to tables in front of their modest homes, where they were selling cold drinks.

  There were four of us, and we eagerly purchased the offered refreshments. The boat waiting to take us back to the island’s main town was docked about two miles away, and we were in a bit of a hurry, since it would soon be dark. But I lagged behind. There were people, mostly women and children, working in the collective rice paddies that surrounded the village. But front-yard farming was mostly a family enterprise, and mostly bananas. I couldn’t tell what kind they were, but as I stared, two children came out of one of the houses. They stared for a minute or two, ran inside, and returned with their mother. She came back with a plate of ripe bananas. Normal practice, I suppose, is to politely refuse such offerings for a while, then gratefully accept them. Being both famished and thrilled at the prospect of trying this strange new breed of banana, my excitement got the better of me, and I took one right away. The fruit was bright yellow, a little stubby, with a very thin skin. I was surprised that it was unbruised. It had a tart taste with firm flesh. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that every other banana on earth is more flavorful than our Cavendish, which makes sense if you think about it: the most common commodities generally favor the least common denominator.

  I was late. The rest of the group was out of sight. I thanked the family, pointing to my watch. The mother nodded and went inside again, motioning me to wait. A minute later, a teenage boy emerged from the back of the house, pushing a moped and holding a bag of bananas. He started it up and motioned for me to get on. With a wobble, a puff of black exhaust, and the bananas in my hand, we sped toward the boat.

  I COULD SPEND the next two hundred pages talking about the bananas of Asia (and I’d love to do that, but space is limited, and I suspect you might tire of reading descriptions of hundreds of Asian bananas). Instead, I’ll focus on the one place that isn’t just most representative of that continent’s fruit but defines and encompasses much of what we know about bananas today.

  That place is India, and there is no country on earth that loves bananas more. There are more varieties of the fruit found there than anywhere else. If you visit, I recommend you search for the lovely Thella Chakkarakeli, a candy-sweet fruit that is moist enough to almost be considered juicy, grown in residential gardens in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, or the Kerala region’s Nendran variety, with its heavy skin and starchy texture. India’s passion for bananas has a long history. Hindus call the fruit kalpatharu. In Sanskrit, that means “virtuous plant.” The country’s bananas are the ones Alexander the Great sampled in 327 BC. Indian mystics are said to have chosen banana plants to provide shade as they meditated; the fruit was believed to be an incarnation of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, beauty, and wisdom. Throughout history, husbands presented bananas to their new brides as a symbol of fertility.

  In India, even those you assume would maintain a technical comportment when it comes to bananas sometimes verge on the mystic when describing the fruit. During a 1998 conference on bananas and food security (the umbrella term for efforts to guarantee adequate nutrition for global populations), Palaniyandi Sundararaju, director of the country’s National Research Center for the Banana, gushed that the fruit is, “Mother Nature’s most wonderful gift.”

  The banana is also one of India’s most plentiful offerings. The country grows 20 percent of the world’s bananas—about 17 million tons—each year. That’s three times more fruit than the world’s number two banana-producing nation, Ecuador—but unlike its South American rival, hardly any of the fruit produced in India is sent abroad. (In Ecuador, nearly every banana exits the country. Domestic consumption represents less than 2 percent of total output.)

  A typical Indian market sells dozens of banana types, including the country’s favorite, Mysore, best described as a sweet-and-sour banana, with a skin no thicker than a few sheets of the paper this book is printed on. Peeling and eating the fruit is just the beginning of Indian banana cuisine. Bananas are used in curries and stews; banana leaves are used as plates in many parts of the country. The fruit is formed into cutlets, as a meat substitute. Banana chips—over a hundred brands—are the nation’s most popular snacks. Even banana peel is eaten, usually grated, fried, and mixed with black-eyed peas. Most horrifying of all to Americans, the Indian banana is used as a substitute for tomatoes in ketchup.

  INDIA’S BANANA MANIA isn’t just an indicator of affection, or even necessity. It is also a sign of diversity. More than 670 types of bananas, cultivated and wild, grow in the country. Thirty-two forest bananas are so rare that only a single plant or two has been discovered. There are likely many others that no person has ever encountered. But what India, and many of the banana-loving nations of Asia, wants to do these days is not only eat the fruit but sell it. India grows a considerable amount of Cavendish for domestic consumption. Exporting the fruit could provide a boon to struggling rural economies, which have largely been left out of the prosperity brought by India’s urban technology revolution.

  But there’s a downside to globalizing Indian bananas. The Cavendish—the only fruit suitable for such an enterprise, as described earlier—is pushing out many local varieties. Already at least one of the country’s garden species has been lost: Musa acuminata subspecies burmannicoides, also known as Calcutta 4, is now found only in botanical gardens.

  New plantations don’t just mean fewer choices for family tables. Wild bananas thrive in many of the places that might be cleared for commercial agriculture. These isolated fruit are not just curiosities or an excuse for a jungle trek. Many of them are resistant to existing banana diseases. Others, though inedible, might be thick skinned. They might grow on smaller trees, which would make them more resistant to being blown down in hurricanes—a big problem in Latin America. And any one of these
traits might be transferable, through genetic engineering, to a new banana: one that might be stronger and that might be the answer to saving the fruit that millions rely on.

  How much of India’s wild banana stock is already gone? Nobody knows. But NeBambi Lutaladio, a banana expert with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, warned in a 2006 report that it is almost certain that “many valuable gene sources have now been lost.”

  There’s risk at the opposite end of the commercial equation as well. When diversity evaporates, with multiple varieties replaced by just one, the chances of that single banana coming down with some kind of illness are increased. The likelihood that the malady will spread, once it arrives, is guaranteed.

  I SAID EARLIER that you probably haven’t tried any Asian bananas—that almost all of our banana supply comes from Central America. Technically, that’s true. But some migrant bananas that began in Asia are now present in our hemisphere. You, or a member of your family, are almost certain to have tried at least one of these transplanted fruits, even if you’ve never left your hometown.

  These bananas made intermediate stops as they found their way to the Americas, arriving mostly via Darwin-era explorers, who carried them to greenhouses around the world.

  One is from Southeast Asia, where it was just one of many local varieties that people enjoyed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a French naturalist named Nicolas Baudin encountered the fruit when he visited the region. He liked it enough to pack a few corms and carry them with him on his travels. Baudin finally deposited the plant at a botanical garden on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Growers there loved the banana so much that they named it after the explorer, calling it the Figue Baudin, or “Baudin’s Fig.”

  The fruit grew as well in our hemisphere as it did in Asia. In 1835 another Frenchman, botanist Jean François Pouyat, carried Baudin’s fruit from Martinique to Jamaica. Again, the fruit was renamed for the person who’d borne it, becoming the Poyo banana. Pouyat was also awarded a prize of a single gold doubloon, worth about $400 today. Four decades later, the Far East import had spread across the region. By that time—it may have disappointed Baudin and Pouyat to know—the name of the fruit had changed again: It was now called Gros Michel. (The origins of the name are unknown, but the fruit is rather large, and perhaps masculine.)

  A century later, that banana could no longer survive in the region. But there was another fruit, in another local garden, that could. That one came from China, where it had also been grown for centuries. It was called the Cavendish.

  CHAPTER 6

  Pacific

  AS BANANAS TRAVELED FROM ASIA out into the rest of the world, they were both improved and diminished. Fruits that succumbed more easily to maladies were culled from the agricultural gene pool, reducing the number of total varieties as they dispersed. Through miles of ocean, from island to island, The banana made its first great journey, across the Pacific, settling on island after island, key cargo on a voyage east conducted over three thousand years by human history’s most daring navigators.

  Determining the exact course of that epic traverse is even more difficult than looking for phytoliths in the remains of an ancient farm. But there’s a similarly useful clue: language. The word people used for “banana” progressed as methodically as evolution, traveling at the same slow pace as human settlement did along a rough circumference of ocean and landmasses beginning near the earliest cultivations in Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea, moving counterclockwise around Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia, and finally ending at Hawaii.

  There are three similar-sounding terms for bananas in this vast area. One is believed to have originated near Samoa and sounds like that island’s current term for the fruit, mei’a. Linguists have uncovered similar words in the Maori language of New Zealand (maika); in Hawaiian (mai’a); and, on the very fringes of this great banana circle, on Easter Island (also maika). In Indonesia, the fruit is known as pisang. The same word appears in the Philippines, Malaysia, and New Guinea. Two other Papuan terms for the fruit—over eight hundred languages are spoken on the world’s second-largest island—are pudi and fud. These words are echoed, over a thousand miles of ocean, in the Solomon Islands, where the fruit is called huti. In Fiji, it is vud. In Tonga (mutating a bit from the original root word), it’s feta’u, and, finally, in Tahiti (mutating some more), the fruit is called fe’i (which also sounds a bit like Hawaii’s mai’a). Tracing those words along a map turns an exercise in linguistics into a physical logbook of the banana’s movements.

  ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I was visiting my local Whole Foods Market in LA; I’d gotten in the habit of cruising the fruit section first, not to look at bananas—they’re pretty much all the same—but at banana stickers and boxes, which usually indicate where they were grown. (I confess that I’ve become a bit of a banana obsessive these past few years.) But on that afternoon, something caught my eye (actually, it sent me into a state of glee). It was a chunky, short banana—twice the diameter of the ones we usually eat and about two-thirds as long. There were only a few bunches, and they cost three times as much as the yellow bananas that far outnumbered them on the shelves, but I had to try it.

  The banana was a Lacatan. It may be the only exotic banana most American consumers will ever get the chance to try. They occasionally appear in U.S. stores, but I’d never seen one. Though any Lacatan you or I might buy in a local market is Caribbean-grown, the fruit was transplanted there from the Philippines, where it is considered to be the best-tasting banana anywhere. The fruit’s flesh is the color of crème brûlée. The taste is lush and full bodied, with an intense flavor that recalls homemade banana ice cream. “True nobility among bananas,” gushes the Web site run by Jon Verdick, owner of a San Diego nursery that sells more than two dozen types of banana plants for home growing (don’t expect much fruit, if any: our climate makes bananas a rather lovely decorative plant but little more).

  The only problem with eating this regal banana is that afterward you may feel—as I now do—condemned to living in a world turned drab when you bite into an ordinary Cavendish. That’s not a problem in the Philippines, however, the world’s fifth-largest banana producer, where Lacatan are piled high at nearly every street market and fruit stand. The Philippines also grow several close banana relatives. Manila hemp, woven from the fibers of the Abaca plant—a cousin—is the raw material for the strong, thick rope used to secure boats and ships to docks. Our most familiar application of the fiber also derives from the substance’s strength: it is the key ingredient in our Manila envelopes.

  Lacatan isn’t an endangered species in the Philippines, but bad omens are appearing. The Abaca plant is susceptible to many of the diseases that affect its edible counterpart, and these maladies are running rampant. In 2005, the governor of Southern Leyte province, part of the Visayan Islands at the center of the Philippine archipelago, asked that the region—where Abaca disease had spread from just 400 acres in 2001 to over 18,000 acres—be declared a disaster area.

  Banana sickness is spreading as well. Large-scale commercial growing of the fruit began in the late 1970s, using bananas imported from Latin America. Those bananas brought disease with them. A scramble began to fight the maladies, even as new plantations were being established. “It went from one farm to the next,” says Gus Molina, Philippine coordinator of an Asia-wide effort to save the fruit. (The campaign is funded by a coalition of banana researchers and scientists from around the world and is called Bioversity International, formerly known as the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, or INIBAP. Bioversity International is also a sponsor of Rony Swennen’s Belgian banana-preservation project.)

  Panama disease was not one of the originally imported maladies. The ones that did arrive—some bacterial, some fungal, and some pests—were controllable, sometimes with crop rotation, more often with expensive chemicals.

  I first spoke to Molina in 2005. At the time, when I asked him if any Panama disease had b
een found in his nation, he said there wasn’t enough data. A regional survey was underway, but with seven thousand islands, checking every farm in the Philippines was nearly impossible. “We don’t know if it can be found in any one place, or anywhere in the country,” he told me. Even if the Philippines were to get a clean bill of health, places nearby were in a similar state of uncertainty. No comprehensive information on Panama disease was available from mainland countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, or Cambodia, though the disease had been seen in Indonesia, where it had spread from the Asian mainland to the islands of Sumatra and Borneo.

  Within the past few years, Philippine uncertainty has vanished. In 2006 pockets of Panama disease were found in Davao, a province on the island of Mindanao. The island is the second largest in the nation, and the soil is some of the world’s richest. Bananas, coconuts, rice, and pineapples grow adjacent to forests of teak, ebony, and cypress. The appearance of the incurable banana malady there is more than cause for scientific alarm. For decades, Mindanao has been the center of a guerilla war pitting government forces against Muslim rebels. The conflict has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives. The fighting is as much about poverty as religion; two years ago, a banana plantation opened with the express purpose of providing jobs for the rebels. More than two thousand of them chose work instead of combat, according to news accounts. (It wasn’t a totally smooth process. At first, the new employees insisted on carrying their weapons in the field. A compromise was eventually reached: Wives would hold the firearms while their husbands were on the job.) Within a year, however, the largest banana growers in the Philippines were bracing for an epidemic. A task force of agricultural technicians, specially trained to recognize signs of the disease, fanned out across the countryside, hoping to teach farmers quarantine measures that slow the malady down. The biggest obstacle, a spokesperson for one of the growers said, came from small-scale, family operations. “If their fields are infected,” she said, “it will likely spread to our farms.”