Banana Read Free

the particular strain of the sickness that destroyed the Gros Michel. That version of Panama disease was only found in the Western Hemisphere. But the sickness lurking in Malaysian soil was different: It was not only deadly to the Cavendish, it killed and moved faster and inspired more panic than its earlier counterpart. I saw this firsthand during the last banana trip I made before this book was published. In early 2007, a Chinese scientist named Houbin Chen led me through a patchwork of plantations in the southern province of Guangdong. There, I witnessed row after row of stunted, rotted fruit. (Whatever disease and destruction I had originally expected to see in Honduras, I, sadly, was seeing now.) The blight became big news in China during the middle of the year, when a newspaper article described the malady as “banana cancer.” Within days, scores of consumers and farmers were avoiding the fruit, fearing that it would make them sick. Within a month, banana sales across China had plummeted. The rumor had transformed: The fruit was now said to cause AIDS—and government officials were frantically issuing pronouncements that bananas were safe to eat. True enough: people can’t catch any disease from bananas.
    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