Banana Read Free Page A

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
    I F 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