Banana : the fate of the fruit that changed the world

The following is a précis written for an advanced graduate colloquium on modern world history at San José State University during the Fall 2012 semester.

 Dan Koeppel has written a courageous book about a “crime in progress” (17) being committed by the few, with externalities for millions, using a gun-shaped tropical fruit as an economic, political and corporate weapon.  This is a popular history book which nonetheless addresses some the most vexing questions of today:  human rights, environmental destruction, corporate greed and malfeasance, transnational interference, consumer manipulation, murder, the relationship between nation states and corporations, genetically modified foods, globalization, hunger, fair trade, journalistic integrity, state-sponsored science and the distribution of risk and wealth.

Koeppel says his book is about saving the banana, but I’m not buying it.  This is a book about the ongoing and escalating conflict between Human Nature and Mother Nature. Human Nature sees the banana as a commodity to be controlled and manipulated.  Mother Nature sees the banana as a practically insignificant byproduct of a complex biosphere which is subject to geographic and climatic variability.  Dan Koeppel argues that we must try and undo what we have done through arrogance and brutality by leveraging our scientific acumen to assure those most vulnerable to the unintended consequences of our efforts be they benign or malevolent. Mother Nature, he suggests, has provided us a “way out” (226) of our banana-induced food trap via genetic manipulation of the banana.

Koeppel is participating in a century-old historiography dedicated to the banana. Prior contributions to this historiography referenced by Koeppel include: Frederick Upham Adams’ Conquest of the Tropics (1914); Philip Keep Reynolds’ The Banana: Its History, Cultivation and Place Among Staple Foods (1927); Schlesinger and Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit:  The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982); Virginia Scott Jenkins’ Bananas: An American History (2001); and, Rich Cohen’s The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (2012).

Banana is essentially a chronological presentation, but one with several different threads.  One thread is simply the story of how the banana has been carried by humans from place to place around the world.  Another thread traces the various natural threats which have arisen from attempts at cultivation of the banana when grown in large scale monoculture without proper controls.  Another thread follows the scientific response to these natural threats.  While yet another is a case study in the personalities and corporations which have wrought both innovation and devastation as part of their business plan to turn off a profit by selling bananas.

While making a fairly complete survey of the history of the banana to date, Koeppel makes several major observations.  He marvels at the appeal (pun intended) of the fruit through the centuries and its consumption by people from cultures around the world. He suggests that the marketing of the fruit to North Americans and Europeans, where it does not grow, has been a source of adventure and innovation that came to pass with a certain serendipity and innocence in the days of Baker and Preston, but that the convergence of transportation technology and urbanization combined to provide a profit motive which quickly turned the selling of an exotic fruit into a headlong rush for power. He provides in- depth explanation of four different major banana diseases:  Panama Diesease, Sigatoka, Banana Bunchy Top Virus Disease (BBTVD), and banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW).  He shows how transnational companies have been and remains stubbornly resistant to change, even against their best interests.  Likewise, when methods and practices for reducing the impact and spread of specific diseases have been developed, these fixes have also been spurned by small farmers who find them too expensive or complicated, or out of simple ignorance. He draws attention to the plight of the dis-empowered local peoples of the banana republics and the risks and suffering they have endured under their influence. Koeppel tells the political history of the major banana republics:  Honduras, Guatemala and Ecuador.  He presents “the two banana worlds” (226):  one where people want the fruit and one where people need the fruit. From these main points, he concludes that because banana cultivation is based on cloning the risks involved in introducing genetically modified bananas into places where the fruit is a dietary staple may be worthwhile.  Perhaps most courageously, he suggests that North Americans might even be ethically obligated to go without our favorite exotic fruit supplement: the banana.

The first thing I came to appreciate about this book was its geographic specificity.  I enjoyed learning about locations like Kuk Swamp and the Irazu volcano.  I enjoy books that take me places and which tell me with accuracy and specificity where the story is happening.  However, I must criticize the publisher and/or author for allowing such a geographically rich narrative to be told without including maps.  By going to find the locations being described on a map, I notice in a few cases that the description provided is inaccurate.

Does this presentation of the history of the banana withstand scrutiny?  I think it does, due in large part to the inclusion of such a large of cast of characters.  While this work tells the story of the banana, it is primarily a tale of individuals who become enchanted on the one hand, or entrapped on the other, by the allure of power which this odd fruit seems to emanate.  I note in several places that it seems as if we are touching on Orientalist themes.  For example, the quotation from the young Frederick Adams encountering the banana for the first time at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876:  “To my young and impressionable mind, this was the most romantic of all the innumerable things at any of the [exhibition’s] vast buildings” (63).  Similarly, discussions of an entirely manufactured repertory of exotic images, and the use of the “Spanish diminutive” (126) chiquita as a brand name, to market the banana reinforce a profoundly colonial disposition by the banana companies towards the cultural sources of the product.

From the perspective of world history, I think Banana is an important addition to the “banana literature.”  Historians have been writing about the banana for over a century now, but Koeppel has written a book which effectively pairs a scientific narrative with the story of the latest struggles between the banana and the diseases which threaten it and the people who bananas.  I think there is room for even more environmental detail in this story, but I appreciate the decision to ration the scientific discourse around the challenges of breeding instead.  The discussions of genetics and soil samples would be obvious areas where illustration would make technical aspects of the narrative more engaging for the reader. +++

A Gun-Shaped Tropical Fruit (Review of BANANA: The Fruit That Changed the World) by Christine Newton Bush is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://spartan-discourse.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://linkedin.com/in/greycat.