Reddit reviews Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

More people have died over the cultivation and export of Bananas than oil.

The phrase "Banana Republic" comes from the bloody history of Central America and the Caribbean where, for the majority of the 19th and 20th century (with remnants well in to the 21st) major multinational fruit companies like "United Fruit" and "Dole" mercilessly controlled the governments of whole countries in order to set up favorable conditions for the growth, harvesting, and export of bananas.

Most of the strife that Central America experienced in the last 50-60 years is related to the Banana trade in one way or another, and the fact the Caribbean Islands are inhabited by predominantly dark-skinned people with African roots is due to the HUGE influx of slave labor imported to grow and harvest Bananas.

NUMEROUS coups have been held, backed by the US CIA, to overthrow democratically elected governments that threatened the Banana industry (not conspiracy theory - verified fact: see Guatemala 1954).

See Bananas: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World for a very readable history of the Banana

You rang?

I haven't read the book, but I've heard a couple interviews with the author through my various foodie podcasts. He seems cool, and he made bananas seem downright fascinating the entire time he was speaking.

Edit: I have read and would heartily recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan if you're even a little interested in the genetic, behavioral, and political! manipulation of our food. Corn, in particular, as it's the backbone of the American food industry, but he covers a lot of ground. It's really eye-opening. Do recommend. (And any half-decent American library will have it, so awesome and free.)

Not exactly...

>A banana plant takes about 9 months to grow up and produce a bunch of bananas. Then the mother plant dies. But around the base of it are many suckers, little baby plants.

>At the base of a banana plant, under the ground, is a big rhizome, called the corm.

>The corm has growing points and they turn into new suckers. These suckers can be taken off and transplanted, and one or two can be left in position to replace the mother plant.

See: http://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/growing-bananas.html

Also, this book was fun to read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452290082?pldnSite=1
Except for the parts where US fruit companies treated central America like garbage... those parts were pretty poops-mcgee.

The video description has three 1 2 3

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

Touches on everything from agricultural science to the entanglement of the fruit industry with the upper echelons of US government. It boggles the mind.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

first things first, the article says they could be extinct "within a decade," and it was written in 2003...so there's that.

now, let me elaborate. The type of banana grown in most of central america is called a "cavendish," it is vulnerable to panama disease race 4, which is not present in central america (but it is pretty much everywhere else). when people say that the cavendish will be going extinct, its because of the inevitability of that strain reaching central america, which it surely will at some point.

now let me discuss that. Bananas are very big business. i believe its somewhere along the lines of 90%+ of American households have bought bananas in the past month. that's huge. Now, do you think that the big fruit companies will allow them to go extinct? that is their cash cow, their core business. they learned a lot from the Big Mikes. For example, in the Philippines, i heard that when panama disease was found on a farm, they burned the whole thing to the ground and didn't use it again for like 30 years. Also, everything that went into the farms and came out of the farms was disinfected...people, vehicles, tools, everything. With the Big Mikes, none of this was done and that why it spread so quickly.

black sigatoka is different, and definitely an issue, but not a huge one and is controllable on farm level to a very effective extent (as far as i know).

To put it in perspective, everyone i know that had anything to do with bananas in central america was never worried about Panama Disease, or sigatoka, or pests. they were more worried about the weather or volcano eruptions or some issue with logistics. believe me, a hurricane will have a much greater impact on a farm than some sigatoka.

Now, if something does happen, and the cavendish is in danger, there are literally thousands of different types of bananas. They would be a little more expensive, as the infrastructure for shipping bananas is based around the cavendish, but i'm sure they would get to you. Also, there is a lab (i forget where or who its owned by) that is dedicated to cultivating new bananas. They have had some success, but i don't believe anything commercially viable...yet.

so relax everyone, your cornflakes will have plenty of bananas for a long time.

source: i work for Chiquita.

TL;DR: Low level Chiquita employee explains why this article isn't entirely accurate.

EDIT: a good read

Not quite. The banana in the supermarket is known as the Cavendish banana, a sterile cultivar. It has no seeds, which is much more appetizing than the alternative. The species Musa acuminata is the progenitor of sweet bananas. The edible bananas we know and love are triploid hybrids. The ones with mostly Musa balbisiana genes are plantains, essentially.

As Wikipedia notes, when the two species were introduced into the same range, they started hybridizing, giving us our delicious banana without all the seeds. When people noticed this, they started growing those more and more. It was a happy accident, and humans started growing them, just like any other crop.

Note that this is just a quick summary, and I encourage you to read more about it. The banana has a pretty fascinating history, and Wikipedia's articles are great places to start.

EDIT: Wow, thanks for the gold! For more information about bananas, check out the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. To get an idea of what the book covers, here's a podcast between Steve Mirsky of Scientific American and the author. It will blow your mind.

It is amazing how much humans have altered the wild, ancestral versions of plants to reach the staple crop version that we are familiar with. Here is a recently published book that covers the sad history of the banana. It covers not only the biology of this sterile mutant that may go extinct, but also the terrible, sad history of it's cultivation with much blood on the hands of the United States government and commercial parties.

Artic Apples. Genetically modified to remove the chemical that makes them spoil after being cut.

or

Market any of the different types of banana that are possible replacements for the currently available Cavendish Banana; Apple Banana (aka Manzano Banana), Lacatan Banana (Red Banana), or Baby Banana. Could also market the old Gros Michel Banana, because so few people remember it.

This book by Dan Koeppel will give you some great background information about how Bananas became the fruit that we know and love. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

Also, I had no idea that there was a huge, amazing world of fruit out there until I tried raw vegan & then fruitarian (currently omnivore, for the record, but still enjoy all types of good ingredients & recipes!) & started digging into varieties & sources a little bit deeper. I pretty much had stuff like apples, oranges, and bananas growing up. Fruit was good, but nothing to get overly excited about...maybe you got a really delicious orange once in awhile, but that was pretty much it, haha! But thanks to international shipping & market demand & places like Whole Foods & Trader Joe's trying to introduce more options to consumers, we have access to more global foods than ever before!

On a tangent, on a fruitarian diet, avocados & tomatoes are actually both included because they are fruits. They kind of fall into the sub-category of "fruit vegetables", along with zucchini, peppers, eggplants, pumpkins (yup), olives, pickles, and paprika (...berries). We eat a lot of Haas avocados in the United States, but they're not even the best ones - there's Reed, Fuerte, etc. But Haas makes more sense for market purposes (the smaller size fits more to a box, they ship better due to thicker skin, etc.), so that's what we get!

That's not a bad thing, however - it's really nice to have avocados available year-round, and even though they're kind of pricey (upwards of $2 each now, where I live), you can use them for so many things... chocolate pudding, Sinh tố bơ (Vietnamese avocado shakes), homemade ice cream (sounds weird, tastes good! I make it with coconut milk & cocoa powder sometimes). My buddy has an epic guacamole recipe available here:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/SalsaSnobs/comments/a3kjdy/the_only_guacamole_recipe_youll_ever_need/
  
  Also, there's a whole crazy world of crime, wars, and corruption that goes on to support the fruit industry. Check out Season 2, Episode 1 of "Rotten" on Netflix ("The Avocado War", 56 minutes long), for example. There are a bunch of great books on the banana as well, , such as "Banana Wars" & "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World". But enough tangents for one thread, haha!

I've been trying to get through The Fruit Hunters but I keep getting stuck. I think it's partly the frustration of knowing I'll never taste a lot of the fruits he writes about. At least not without spending a lot of money.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

There are some food-related book suggestions on that page, but none seem to be about fruit.

The big news here is that this particular strain of Panama disease has gotten out of Asia. It's not going to wipe out banana production overnight, but now that it's in Africa it could very well lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths due to starvation. There are a number of countries in Africa where families rely on a banana tree for an enormous amount of their daily caloric intake. While most of those countries don't use the Cavendish cultivar I believe a few of the most popular varietals are susceptible to this fungus. There are some that are resistant. I'm trying to remember which ones. I want to say the Brazilians have one that's tart and almost crunchy like an apple but the big companies don't want to switch to it because it's "too different".

There are also varietals that have a significantly higher quantity of vitamins and are all around more nutritious than the Cavendish, but again the major corporations, Dole and Chiquita, think the consumer is too unwilling to stomach a change in flavor or they themselves are unwilling to adjust their supply chain to accommodate more delicate fruit. My uncle actually grows the old Gros Michel or "Big Mike" that everyone used to eat. It's SIGNIFICANTLY better. It's got a thicker peel so it transports more easily and oh my god it's so creamy. There's actually a line of thought that the banana is the fruit referenced in the garden of Eden description which seems more plausible when you try the better varietals and lines up with where bananas were historically grown and eaten.

The sky-is-falling style rhetoric that accompanies this issue is a result of the frank inevitability of Panama disease shutting down industrial Cavendish operations. There is no way to stop it, currently they use incredibly harsh pesticides to slow it. The banana is uniquely difficult to genetically modify or even cross breed because any of the common edible versions deliver something absurd like 1 seed per 1 million fruit so the researchers are forced to either sift through that many bananas or more commonly they use current wild bananas which have massive seeds and then try to slowly breed the seeds out. It's a huge pain. Anyway the Cavendish is almost guaranteed to die unless there are some major breakthroughs in mycology. At the current rate, they're looking at 10-20 years max assuming no huge advances.

I recently read that book they referenced which gives a lot of fascinating detail about the history behind the banana industry and this particular fungus and where I got most of this detail. It's a fantastic read especially if you want to hear about the United States explicit backing of two major corporations as they effectively cripple central america in order to better control their labor. This book: http://www.amazon.com/Banana-Fate-Fruit-Changed-World/dp/0452290082/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394076091&sr=1-1&keywords=banana

어? 아닙니다. ㅋㅋ 제가 만든 표현은 아니고, 사실 "hands"가 바나나 전문 용어일 거예요.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World 보시면:

> [...] A typical flowering Cavendish produces about a dozen hands, each with as many as twenty individual fingers (fruits). [...]

I don't know if anyone mentioned this book, but it explains it all.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0452290082?cache=6db4832a0fc64ca7b7e8ec0d2320c537&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&qid=1404189491&sr=8-13#ref=mp_s_a_1_13

For those who found this interesting, I implore you to read Dan Koeppel's book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. It is a well-researched and entertaining look at how a single fruit dramatically changed human history. I highly recommend it, it will change the way you look at the world.

When importation of bananas originally began in the 19th century- they were quite expensive (10 cents or $2 per banana in today's currency). However by the late 19th century Andrew Preston and Lorenzo Dow Baker developed such a successful system for growing and transporting the fruit that they were able to drop the price so that bananas cost half as much as apples. There's a good book on the history of the banana by Dan Koeppel.

It may be this one

Read this for some additional history.

If anyone's interested in learning more about the history of banana, I'd highly recommend this book. The author does a great job keeping you interested, such a fun read.