Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World

Market Advertises Banana Type as 'Cavendish'

I took this pic with my mobile July 24 at the Whole Foods on Houston St. in lower Manhattan. I've never seen a U.S. retailer get so specific.

First Field Test of Genetically Modified Cavendish

Australian banana researcher James Dale. Image: QUT

Cavendish is our supermarket banana - the one that's under threat from the newly-remerged Panama Disease (see here for more info.) The Cavendish banana is absolutely seedless and sterile, so it cannot be bred conventionally; the only sway to ensure its future as a commercial fruit would be through genetic engineering (the alternative would be to allow the Cavendish to die out and replace it with a different - and as yet unidentified - banana variety.) Now, according to a news report from the Australia Broadcasting Company, a project spearheaded by Australian scientist James Dale, who runs the Queensland University of Technology's Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities, has begun the field test of such fruit - the first time lab-modified Cavendish have ever been put to large-scale outdoor trial. The test, the story says, will be "to improve the nutrient content and disease resistance of Cavendish bananas."

Australia is in desperate banana straits right now, having lost much of its crop to poor weather and a subsequent Panama Disease attack. The field tests are partially being funded by a grant from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. (Dale, by the way, prefers to use the term "biofortification" to describe genetically engineered fruit - one of a long list of proposed terms for such processes, including "genetically modified," "transgenic," "GM," "GMO," and others. The desire to come up with a less-scary name for lab-developed foods is understandable, but misguided. The real problem is that people have been misled into thinking that all genetic modification of foods is terrifying. The responsibility for this comes partially from big agricultural companies who have behaved terribly when they have introduced modified products - but also from consumer groups who oppose all forms of genetic modification while failing to understand even the basics of the science behind it. )

Comment: The Australia trials will likely horrify some folks - possibly because earlier tests of genetic bananas weren't focused on supermarket fruit, and this brings the prospect of a so-called "Frankenbanana" closer to home. But genetic engineering isn't an absolutely scary prospect, and this kind of work is needed with bananas, both because they're a vital subsistence food, and because they're such a weak organism. And the Cavendish is a very safe banana to experiment on: with no seeds or pollen, there is zero - absolutely zero - chance of it the kind of cross-crop contamination occurring that we've seen with engineered corn. Bananas need a lot of help to survive - and the lab is one of the places that help is going to come from. Not that the Down Under effort is entirely altruistic, I'm sure: if a Panama Disease-resistant banana can be built by Dale and his team, they'll also have built a gold mine.

This is Real: Banana-Smuggling Ring Smashed

Chiquita-owned banana boat, c. 1932

Newsweek's July 12th issue reported that a boatload of Ecuadorian fruit intercepted by Italian authorities two years ago was part of a larger smuggling ring that realized money was to be made in black-market fruit on the continent, and not - as was originally thought - a one-off incident (perhaps a botched cocaine smuggling operation, where somebody forgot to stuff the fruit full of the drug.) An investigation completed this week reported on the business:

"The trade is big enough now that the Italian authorities are becoming concerned about lost revenue. When officials completed a two-year probe into illicit fruit smuggling this week, they found the trade represented losses of more $80 million in customs fees and more than $2 million in unpaid sales tax on bananas alone."

The reason? Bananas are highly taxed in Europe, the result of trade laws that favor fruit grown in former colonies, mostly in Africa and the Caribbean. So fruit from Ecuador - the world's largest banana exporter - comes under restrictive levies. U.S. based-banana companies have been fighting over the taxes for years, but the issue rages on. Chiquita recently adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy by announcing it would open new plantations in Africa.

For consumers, the smuggled bananas turned out to be a good deal. investigators helped uncover the extent of the plot by visiting grocers and noticing extraordinarily low prices for the fruit. "We kept wondering how they [the markets] can be selling these Ecuadorean bananas so cheap," one said. No longer, he added: "That certainly won't be the case now."

More on banana trade wars here.

More on Chiquita in Africa here.

Troubling Times for Supermarket Bananas

This sign was spotted at the QFC market in the Wallingford area of Seattle, on 45th St. Reader Mac reports that there were also some "gross" looking red bananas present.

Varietal Banana Coming to U.S. markets?

For 100 years, the big banana growers have said it couldn't be done: bring a better-tasting, non-commodity version of the fruit to the American shopper. The reasons? Bananas have to be cheap; they need to be grown in massive quantities; they need to be shipped and processed in ways that require least-common-denominator techniques that lead to a product that's good - but nowhere near as tasty as some local varieties or even a standard fruit (the breed we eat is called a Cavendish) eaten locally.

I recently spoke to a fruit importer named Jose Ubilla who hopes to change that. His family runs a small Nicaraguan banana plantation, and began importing fruit under the Coquimba brand name in mid-June (the fruit is being marketed as "The Gourmet Banana.") Though the fruit is of the same Cavendish variety that you'll find in supermarkets everywhere, Ubilla says that the fruit he's selling are bigger, better tasting, and will arrive at markets in better condition that standard supermarket fruit than the Chiquita, Dole, and Bonita bananas you're used to seeing. The reason? Shorter shipping times and better handling: the fruit is babied on the tree, with each bunch picked at its individual point of readiness, and then shipped in carefully monitored containers: "You can't do it this way if you're handling large quantities of fruit," says Ubilla.

The fruit is currently being sold at a few farmers markets in Florida, so - being in Los Angeles - I haven't had a chance to sample it. But Ubilla is working with a California distributor, as well, and promises me a taste - so stay tuned; I'll be updating with an on-the-spot report.

Comment: there's no doubt that a fresh Cavendish is better tasting (and has a less mushy texture) than a less fresh one, and shipping in small quantities with more care makes all the difference. I can't tell you how many letters I get asking how it is possible that the bananas folks have eaten in Central America can be the same variety as the one they get in supermarkets here. If the Coquimba fruit performs as promised, it should be closer to that straight-from-the-plantation experience.

The challenge Coquimba faces is marketing. Consumers are used to treating bananas as a commodity. Are they going to be willing to pay more for a banana that might not look all that different than the ones they're used to? I love Ubilla's idea of selling at farmers markets - a place bananas have usually been absent from.

But here's what I'd really love to see: Coquimba to succeed so much that it goes one step beyond Cavendish - and gets into different banana varieties entirely. With hundreds of delicious non-Cavendish banana types out there, why not approach the fruit the way apple producers did a decade ago when they introduced today's plethora of varieties to a market that featured only the bland red delicious and granny smith? Check out these articles (here and here) on the bananas of India. If only we could get a few of those into our stores!

Would you be willing to pay a little more for a fresher-from-the-tree, better-tasting banana? Add your comment below.

Banana Juice Research in India is conducted by Nuclear Energy Experts

Atomic banana juice from India

This is really more than you'll ever want to know about extracting juice from bananas, but it is interesting, because the folks at India's Bhaba Atomic Research Centre have figured out ways to squeeze a lot more juice from the fruit than previously was thought to be possible. I don't know why the nuclear scientists are spending time doing this, though my (absolutely uninformed) guess is that atomic research involves advanced centrifuges, and so do the juice extraction techniques described on the linked pages. A second guess might be more political: India's atomic energy program is a huge source of national pride and strategic military importance. Bananas are also a source of national pride - and are of huge importance to the national diet. Maybe it isn't so silly that top minds and resources would be devoted to working on both in a single facility?

Or maybe these guys just have a lot of time on their hands and got thirsty.

A Visit to the New Home of the International Banana Museum

Top Banana Glen Speer

A humble exterior, four miles south of Interstate 15.

I finally got a chance to visit the new home of the International Banana Museum (previous posts here and here) earlier this month. It was awesome! I just missed Ken Banister - the museum's founder, who moved his banana collection from the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena to the high desert town of Hesperia, California, about a year ago, but I found myself in the able hands of Glen Speer, whose business card lists him this way:

GLEN SPEER

Genuine Antique Christian Person

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, CAN"T REMEMBER

Free Advice!

Top Banana - Banana Museum

Hesperia, CA

His credentials turned out to be impeccable and true. Glen graciously showed me around, recommended that I have lunch at the omelette place across the street - over 100 types of egg-based dishes - and encouraged me to take lots of pictures, which I did. As I was leaving, another local told me to quit with the snapshots: "You'll make his head even bigger!" But from the looks of things, Glen has a lot to be proud of.

More on the museum, including additional pictures, after the jump.

Heroic Clerk Saves Store from Banana Attack

Battles Banana-Wielding Thug.

In my book, I note that one observer described the banana as a "weapon of conquest" in Latin America. This doesn't apply in Maryland, where a would-be thief attempted to use the fruit to rob a 7-Eleven - and was denied by a brave clerk.

Incredibly (or maybe not so incredibly), this isn't the first time this has happened - and the last time, the guy got eighteen months in the hoosegow for his malfeasance (third item down.)

Chiquita is Motley Fool's "Worst Stock in the World"

At least for today - Monday, June 18. The reasons include the company's dismal forecast for the third quarter (a "significant loss," it told investors); the payments it was revealed to have made to Colombian terrorists; and worries about the Panama Disease fungus arriving in Latin America. The investment site specifically takes Chiquita to task for failing to diversify its banana offerings on supermarket shelves, noting that the disease-threatened Cavendish is "the only Banana that Chiquita sells." The conclusion? "Big Trouble."

Here's what Chiquita needs to do: figure out how to sell more bananas than the Cavendish. Figure out a way to make transporting and growing them much more environmentally friendly. And move toward fair trade principles, which I think are more important - at the moment - than organics.

More here.

SPECIAL REPORT: Urgent threat to Africa's Bananas - news update, how to help

Plants killed by BXW, arguably today's deadliest banana disease.

Close up: bacterial discharge from a banana plant.

Note to readers: This is a long post, based on news reports from the past week. I think it's important - please, if you can, read it, and pass it on. Thanks.

In the months since I've been publishing this blog - and in the now six months since my book has come out - this is probably the most serious and important item I've posted. In the past week, new reports of the spread of what is the most deadly banana disease facing the crop right now - banana xanthomonas wilt (BXW) - have appeared in the African news media.

For the first time, the disease has appeared in Kenya. BXW moves easily - it can be transmitted in dirt, by people, on tools, or even by birds. It has so far appeared in the Teso, Busia, Malaba, Chakol, and Busia districts of the nation, all near the Ugandan border. Once it shows up in a banana plantation, it is likely spread by insects.

In Uganda, meanwhile, the disease has become so widespread that yields on banana farms have reached dangerously low levels. Acres and acres of crops have been lost, creating a cascade of economic losses in a trading system that spreads from the tiniest villages to Uganda's cities, all based on the transport and trade of bananas.

The urgency of this cannot be overstated. Uganda and the nations surrounding it absolutely depend on bananas as a staple foodstuff. Millions rely on bananas for survival. And the spread of BXW into Kenya is yet another indicator that this deadly disease is on the march. As with Panama Disease - the wilting fungus that threatens our banana, the Cavendish - BXW (a bacterial malady) is incurable. The difference between the two is that BXW moves faster and threatens, right now, food supplies in nations with fragile governments.

What's to be done? Two things. And I'm going to say some stuff that might disturb that regular readers of this blog, especially those who know that I take a very hard line when it comes to corporate skullduggery directed banana workers in South and Central America. In this case, I'm going to veer away from what is traditionally seen as a related "socially responsible" stance.

FIRST, banana diversity. In order to mitigate the spread of disease, the number of kinds of bananas being grown needs to be increased. But there's a real disconnect in the world of food security - that means the organizations that help manage and alleviate hunger - when it comes to bananas. A lot of them don't know how important bananas are; those that do don't pay a lot of attention to how important funding the preservation of banana diversity (and banana research in general) is. There's just not enough time or money being spent on bananas compared to other staple crops. And let's not even get into whether or not the big banana companies care to fund research that might recognize the importance of saving the sister breeds of the one they make billions on: many - if not most - banana executives don't even know that subsistence bananas exist (or that they might help in reverse, since they could contain genetic material that could help save the Cavendish, which is also threatened by disease.

SECOND, genetic engineering: It is time for the general public to recognize that working at the DNA level is not always a corporate trojan horse into destroying local agriculture and contaminating the environment. This isn't all about Monsanto. While consumers in the suburbs and Whole Foods stores protest against all GMO foods - while barely knowing what GMO is - they bluntly prevent out legitimate public research that might stop hunger. Time learn that everything has nuance, the disease that are killing the bananas: they work in just two modes: off - and on.

About the images and BXW: the first shot shows a plantation that has been destroyed by BXW. The leaves of the banana plant have turned black and yellow, and then wilted altogether. Without leaves, the banana plant dies. Another key point: in village agriculture, the death of a banana tree can mean a cascade of disaster in a family's diet, because other staple foods grow in the shade the tree creates. The second image shows bacterial material oozing from the plant itself.

Even if you think genetic engineering sucks, you should write to Fernando Aguirre, the CEO of Chiquita, and ask him to fund global banana research. This is the address:

Chiquita

250 E. Fifth Street

Cincinnati OH 45202 USA

You will probably get a form letter in reply unless you include a line in there that says something like: "I challenge you not to include a form letter in reply." You might also include printouts from the below links, or a printout of this blog entry.

Here's a link on the Kenya spread. Here's a link on the Uganda crisis. Here's a link to Bioversity International, the group that coordinates banana research worldwide. You can learn a lot more there. Things are really moving quickly now when it comes to saving the banana - but they aren't hopeless. The keys, again: Diversity. Conservation. Research.

Images via the British Society for Plant Pathology

Australia to tax bananas starting July 1

These are Australian things.

Australia's banana crop has been devastated by bad weather and Panama Disease. Now, the country is going to be imposing a AUS 1.7 cent-per-kilo (1.5 cents US) levy on the fruit. It will be applied at the wholesale level, then passed on to the consumer, starting July 1.

Nicky Singh, president of the Australian Banana Growers Council, said that revenues from the tax would raise $5 million AUS (4.7 million US) to fund "promotions, research and development, and plant health programs."

The imposition of a single-foodstuff tax is a big development, and another indication of how serious the problem of banana disease is. Australia, as I've noted before, is becoming a world epicenter for banana problems. 85% of the country's crop was destroyed by a cyclone in 2007, leaving the remaining fruit vulnerable to Panama Disease, which began to spread aggressively last year, despite a quarantine program designed to stop the malady.

News report on banana tax here.

Earlier Australia report here.

Read my article on Panama Disease in "The Scientist"

The most controversial part of my book is my assertion that biotech is key to saving the banana. I came by this assertion with a lot of difficulty - initially believing that most genetic engineering in our food supply was a bad thing. But, as usual, the issue isn't black and white. With bananas, the shade of gray is especially green.

Read the piece here.

Wired magazine: Frankenfoods, good; Hippie foods, bad?

First good. Second, not so good.

More or less, maybe, according to the May issue of the science/tech/culture publication, because:

GMO agriculture may have a smaller carbon footprint than traditionally grown crops.

Organics may have a larger carbon footprint than traditionally grown crops.

In my book, I note that the promise of organic bananas is far less than we'd wish it to be - and the potential of GM bananas has been so undervalued (and so feared) as to be a factor in creating hunger in banana-dependent populations worldwide, as well as contributing to the reduction of genetic diversity in the global banana crop.

.

LA Times on Banana Museum

Best banana picture ever - from the banana museum's website

Fake memoirist, real novelist, and - best of all - Oprah nemesis James Frey mentions Altadena banana museum; Los Angeles Times uses "banana expert" (me) to confirm that it exists (or existed; it has since moved to Hesperia, in the California high desert.)

About the picture: The proprietor of the museum, Ken Banister, has his shirt open at the belly. He is standing above a "banana club" logo, and next to a pile of bananas. A man who has burst into flames runs in front of them. To Ken's left a child on an adult's shoulders seems to stare in amazement. To the right, two adults laugh. The man closer to Banister seems to be applauding. All the way on the left side of the picture, a man in a pork pie hat and red knee socks, sitting and only half in frame, appears to be indifferent to the spectacle.

What in heck is going on here?

We Throw a Lot of Good Food Away

Image: New York Times

...including brown bananas, which have lots of uses, including banana bread.

Great story in the New York Times. More on the Wasted Food Blog.

This is not meant to be the Chiquita blog, but...

You really can't help it when you see stuff like this. What does this mean? I can't tell, because - and this is another news flash - Chiquita has redesigned its website so that it de-emphasizes bananas - and made it unnavigable in the process (I tried to find some kind of marketing info on the sticker. No luck.) But even weirder, given the company's recent history of terrorist payoffs in Colombia - money which went directly for arms purchases - is the slogan itself. Fights for you? Does anybody at the banana giant's corporate headquarters think about this stuff?

I would love to see some normal news come out of Chiquita - but there doesn't seem to be much, other than an announcement of increased profits thanks to higher banana prices in the first quarter of this year.

Chiquita's bad news leads to a bigger question. As I noted in the post before this one, Dole and Del Monte have also now been accused of paying protection money in Colombia. But it is Chiquita that is getting hammered in the media. I wonder if the company regrets going public. Probably. But the reason it is getting the beat down it is now receiving - in my view - is not because it went public. The reason is that it went public only halfway. Watch the 60 Minutes interview again, if you haven’t already. Chiquita CEO Aguirre is ducking and covering. He's pretending to take responsibility while not taking responsibility. The company is getting hit because it is claiming to have done the right thing when it clearly didn't, and that leads to the suspicion that it went public not because it felt that it was ethical, but because bad stuff was coming down the pike, and it needed some quick cover.

"60 Minutes" on Chiquita and Colombia - were Dole and Del Monte guilty, too?

Though it fails to mention Chiquita's long and bloody history in Colombia, the CBS News program's report - which aired on May 11 - detailing the banana giant's payments to terrorist groups in Colombia, and the consequences of those payments, is remarkably hard-hitting, and features a sit-down interview with Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre, who - to me - dodges a lot of questions. The big scoop here are accusations from a jailed Colombian terrorist that Dole and Fresh Del Monte also made payments.

What do you think? Is the report fair? Is Chiquita ducking responsibility.

Chiquita's Banana profits and new African plantations

Just a couple of quick notes from Chiquita's first-quarter financial report, issued May 1. The company made a $31.7 million profit - after losing $3.4 million the same period last year - fueled mostly by surging banana prices. What's interesting is that the actual amount of bananas people bought dropped - by one percent in the U.S., and fourteen percent in Europe - but because of bad weather and other market conditions that have constrained supply, prices have shot up: by 18% and 26% in the two selling areas, respectively. This made Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre very happy: "Banana pricing is very acceptable," he told investors, noting that prices have held pretty steady for over a decade.

The other bit of interesting news is the soon-to-come opening of the first big Chiquita plantations in Africa, in Mozambique and Angola. The reason these commercial banana farms are being launched on that continent is to get around European tariff regulations that make Latin America-originated bananas expensive to sell in Europe. But it was the cutting of land for new Cavendish (that's the world's commercial banana) plantations in Asia two decades ago that led to the spread of Panama Disease there; that malady is now epidemic and threatens the world's banana supply. There was no mention in Chiquita's earnings call - nor has the company ever mentioned - what precautions it is taking to make sure the new plantations it is opening, or the transportation networks that connect the plantations to shipping areas, will be effectively sealed from existing banana crops. I can't even begin to state how important this is in Africa, where bananas are a major subsistence crop, though I can tell you why Chiquita has made no such statement: because it has been proved, over and over, that it can't be done.

And in good news, Chiquita has just posted a fantastic "cool stuff" page, with tons of old print and television ads, banana stickers, and other archival material. I'll highlight some of it in the future, but it is definitely worth exploring.

News article on Chiquita's earnings call here. Download a pdf of Chiquita's results here. Listen to audio here.

Help Flooded Ecuadorian Banana Farmers

Images from Oke's Flickr photostream.

To assist washed-out Ecuadorean banana farmers, fair-trade importer Oke is taking donations to buy a Bobcat earth-mover. It's a worthy cause. Read about it here.

More on fair trade, Ecuador's floods, and rising banana prices here, here, here, and especially here.

Suspended? For this?

Image: Lake County News-Sun

This seems draconian. Even worse is the kid quoted at the end, who sucks up and accepts his sentence.

ZION, Ill., April 23 (UPI) -- A Zion, Ill., high school has suspended 11 seniors involved in a prank that featured a student in a gorilla costume chasing banana-clad seniors in the hallways.

Zion-Benton Township High School handed seven-day suspensions to the costumed students, who phoned in sick before the stunt and wore pantyhose over their heads to conceal their identities during the prank, the Waukegan (Ill.) News-Sun reported Wednesday.

Some of the students said the school overreacted with the harsh punishment.

"What's funnier than a gorilla chasing bananas through a school? Nothing," said Andrew Leinonen, the prank's mastermind and the student who dressed as a gorilla. "It was a harmless prank."

However, others said they were just thankful the school decided not to bar them from prom and graduation.

"We think this is a just punishment," said Brendon Epker, one of the students who dressed as bananas. "We broke rules we shouldn't have broken."

A longer and more explanatory account of the whole affair is here.

A slideshow is here.

These kids deserve medals, not demerits.

Eat bananas, ensure a male heir

The recent Oxford University study showing that eating breakfast made women more likely to conceive male children than females centered specifically around potassium consumption, meaning bananas, whose phallic nature - in some cultures, at least - is believed to have an influence on what goes on in the womb.

"We were able to confirm the old wives' tale that eating bananas, and so having a high potassium intake, was associated with having a boy," said Fiona Matthews, who led the study of 740 first-time mothers published in the strangely-named journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B."

So, there you have it. Do with it what you will. Read more here.

Bill Gates funds Banana Research

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has begun one of the largest privately-funded banana genetics research projects; the greenhouse breeding program is concentrating on subsistence bananas - the kind millions of people in the African highlands depend on as their primary source of nutrition - and using DNA engineering and traditional breeding techniques to increase levels of vitamin A and iron in those fruits.

Those are worthy goals, but I find it interesting that building disease resistance - the most important thing that needs to happen in the area surrounding Lake Victoria, where fungal wilts are rapidly destroying banana crops - seems to be a secondary goal, at least according to the article linked above. The project is being run by James Dale, a well-known banana biotech researcher who is quoted in my book.

Meanwhile, in Africa, some Gates foundation work is seen as controversial, precisely because it is technology-oriented. My feeling is that bananas - because they are quite difficult to breed, and because it is very late in the game in terms of improving their strength in the field - require as much technology as they can get. In this case, perhaps, this may be a version of Windows that is able to prevent viruses (sorry.)

The most expensive bananas in America?

A buck a pound - or more - for bananas?

Just spent a weekend with my girlfriend visiting the action-packed and gorgeous little town of McCall, Idaho - about two hours north of Boise. We did some amazing backcountry and nordic skiing - helped by a late-season dump that put almost a foot of fresh powder on the slopes (yes, the life of a struggling author. It kills!) - and generally had a good time checking out the coffee shops and restaurants in the lakeside village (population: 2,500, but getting trendy, according to the New York Times.)

But when we went in search of lunch, we stopped in at a small gourmet shop - the nice City Market & Wine, right on State Highway 55 - and I saw something I'd never, ever encountered: bananas for over a buck a pound (in fact, the price was $1.11.) The clerk explained that these organics - the country of origin wasn't noted, but I could tell from the stickers that they were from Mexico - had been going up for months (see my previous entry on banana prices, here), and had just broken the 99 cent barrier a week earlier.

Yes, McCall's an isolated resort town, and this was a gourmet market, so prices are going to be high. But for me, this is more shocking than gas at four bucks a gallon.

A banana tree in New Hampshire?

I saw this item in the online edition of the Concord Monitor, the daily newspaper of New Hampshire's capitol city. According to the writer, a banana plant has spontaneously yielded fruit in front of Canterbury elementary school. The article linked here claims to have dispatched a photographer, though I couldn't seem to find a photograph. But the item turned out to be true. I contacted principal Mary Morrison, and here's what she wrote back:

"Yes, we have banana tree in our front hallway. The father of a fourth grade student who works in a nursery offered to donate a plant to the school. His son chose the banana tree. This was three years ago. The three foot high plant is now almost ten feet tall and has a bunch of green bananas."

Though indoor banana trees aren't rare, having them yield fruit isn't necessarily common. The first person in the western world to accomplish such a feat was Linneaus, the father of modern taxonomy, and he did it in the 18th century! Hint to the schoolkids: bananas don't ripen until they're picked - that's a risk, though, since they don't always ripen when removed from the tree. I'd suggest starting with one and seeing what happens.

Added, April 2: Pictures, courtesy principal Morrison!

Reducing the carbon impact of supermarket bananas

Don't blame the cute l'il ethylene molecule.

The "miracle" - if you want to call it that - of the banana industry is that it manages to transport a fragile fruit thousands of miles and still get it to your supermarket green, ready to fully ripen ("flecked with brown," as the Chiquita jingle says) in exactly seven days. For over a century, this has been accomplished by controlling the atmosphere that surrounds the bananas in transport.

When fruit ripens, it gives off ethylene gas. Ethylene is a naturally-occurring substance, emitted as fruits ripen, and providing a sort of on-off switch to let other fruits nearby "know" when to ripen. (That's why bananas ripen so evenly across a bunch.) It is also the "world's most commonly produced organic compound," according to a Science Daily report. Fruit distributors keep "ripening rooms," where levels of ethylene can be controlled to hasten or delay ripening.

The report also notes that the current way industrial ethylene is generated for those ripening rooms (as well as dozens of other uses, including as a mecical anesthetic) releases a "miasma of greenhouse gasses." (Sigh.) But scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab have recently come up with a new way to produce the gas via creating a high-temperature membrane that blocks the release of greenhouse gasses, allowing only harmless hydrogen to get through.

Doomsday Vaults and Black Box bananas

The "Fort Knox of Food." From the International Herald Tribune.

The recent publicity about the opening of the "Global Seed Vault" in Longyearbyen, Norway, has prompted some questions about whether or not bananas are included. The vault is 500 meters deep, buried under a snow-capped mountain, and is filled with over a hundred million (!!!) different kinds seeds, all as a hedge against the predicted destruction to plant life global warming may be about to wreak. The project was described as a "backup hard drive" for agriculture by the New York Times (story). But bananas aren't included. Why?

Simple: bananas don't have seeds. And banana plantlets - the primary means of storing genetic material for the fruit - are an impossible fit for the Norwegian project, which can only store the so-called "orthodox" seeds - the kind that can be preserved dry. Storing bananas, as a recent press release from Bioversity International noted, need "human intervention. That's always been the story with bananas. We brought them from the forest thousands of years ago, and we've carried them around the world. They aren't just a product of human enterprise - they're a companion to humanity.

Liquid nitrogen keeps the banana materials at minus 320 degrees fahrenheit (-196 degrees c.)

So, is there a banana bank account out there, working as a hedge against disaster? Yes - it is called the "Black Box" collection, stored at the French Research Institute for Development, in Montpellier, France. The tissue samples there duplicate of those stored at the International Transit Center at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium; that institution is one of the leading center for banana genetic research. "It's a mirror of the need for crop diversity itself," Emile Frison, Bioversity's Director General, said. "Just as humanity needs different varieties of crops, so different crops need different kinds of long-term storage."

That's good news for bananas, which face many present-day external attackers - diseases and pests especially virulent to the fruit, which suffers from declining genetic diversity - that are as destructive as the doomsday scenarios contemplated by the ice mountain project.

(This story is based on a press release from Bioversity. Read it in its entirety here - it includes the story of how the Black Box works, and why bananas require unique storage techniques.)

Better Red than dead?

A Jamaican red banana plant, from Hirt's Gardens.

One possible alternative to the threatened yellow Cavendish banana is the so-called "red" banana - that's the color of the fruit's flesh - which is grown in Colombia, Ecuador, and in other parts of South and Central America. The "red" is sometimes considered a variant or cousin of the delicious Philippine Lacatan,

The Telegraph newspaper, in the U.K., now reports that some grocers have begun offering the differently-colored variety to consumers, and are having success with it. Describing the fruit as having a "raspberry flavor," and "creamy white pink flesh," the story goes on to say that consumers are responding well to the new offering. (I'm not too sure the "raspberry" descriptor is right. Red bananas, to me, are more apple-like.)

So far, only one UK supermarket chain is offering the fruit. A manager there said that he doubted that the red banana could replace the yellow one, that it was seen more as an attempt to add variety to the limited-to-one choice banana consumers have had for over a century.

The red banana isn't a Cavendish replacement technologically, either, since it grows slower, in fewer places, and ripens much faster than the hardier, blander, and more widespread yellow variety. But diversity is key to saving the banana, so adding a new color - or two (orange bananas grow in the South Pacific) is a great start.

Whole Foods markets in the U.S. often stock red bananas.

Bring fairness to the fruit

Harriet Lamb's new book, "Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles: How We Took on the Corporate Giants to Change the World", is out in the U.K. I'm awaiting a review copy, but an excerpt was printed on the NewConsumer magazine website. Fairtrade is a system that seeks to ensure that the folks who produce the foods we eat are well compensated for it; work in safe environments; and have an element of ownership over those products. Bananas were one of the first items Fairtrade advocates worked on in the early part of this decade, which makes sense, because bananas are highly visible at market, and banana workers have been particularly ill treated since the industry was founded in the 19th century.

U.S. consumers don't see much Fairtrade product - you'll find beans produced under that banner at Starbucks, but very little else,especially at your average chain grocery - and globally, bananas with the certification don't make much of a statistical dent in overall sales: less than one-tenth of one percent of the 13 million metric tons of the fruit produced every year for export are certified by Fairtrade Labeling Organization (it is also important to point out that Fairtrade bananas are not necessarily organic, and that farming conventional bananas - no matter who receives the profits - requires applications of often-toxic chemicals.)

But, as the book notes, Fairtrade's impact has also been symbolic, and the idea is spreading. One advocate put it this way:

"Don’t look only at sales volumes and market shares, look at the issues on the agenda, look at what the public are asking and what companies are debating. When we go into negotiating rooms with companies now, even if they’re not yet doing Fairtrade, they all have to do something on social and environmental issues."

What place does Fairtrade have in the global effort to save the banana? If one of the answers involves making more kinds of banana available to consumers - building a market in so-called "varietal" fruit, which would likely command a premium price - that could dovetail nicely with the economic development ideals of Fairtrade.

Learn more about Fairtrade.

This book (might one day) be printed on banana paper

Note: This entry originally appeared on the Penguin authors' blog, which I contributed to this week.

If you've bought my book, then you know that the subject - saving the banana from a disease that currently threatens it - has, as its background, the notion of monoculture: relying on a single crop, rather than diverse ones, leaving that crop open to all-in-one-blow disasters.

One way to expand bananas beyond the modern monoculture would be to recognize that the fruit is usable for other products. One of the most intriguing of these is paper. The banana "tree" isn't a tree at all - it is a giant herb. That means a lot of things (for example, a banana plant has no bark), but for the sake of making paper, the big advantage is this: a banana plant grows like crazy. A productive plantation can see tiny stems reach as high as twenty feet in a single year. Each "tree" produces one bunch - about 150 individual bananas - of fruit per year; it then gives "birth" to another tree. The process can continue virtually forever. The big question has been what to do with those giant trees, which quickly fall over one they've fruited, and usually are discarded after they've been.

More after the jump; or watch this informative (but very dry) video about the banana paper manufacturing process.

First Pictures - Transgenic bananas in Ugandan field trial

For reasons I go over in the book, I've come to believe - and I never thought I'd feel this way when I started my research - that transgenic, or GM (genetically modified) bananas are the most likely answer to the diseases that now threaten the crop's future. Transgenics are especially key in Africa, where bananas are the primary supplier of calories for millions of people. The loss of local banana crops in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi would be catastrophic.

For years, banana scientists have been fighting to get permission to launch limited trials of the transgenic fruit. Last year, a team led by Rony Swennen, head of the Division of Crop Biotechnics and the Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement at Belgium's Catholic University of Leuven (whew! link ) was finally allowed to begin trials of lab-bred bananas at Kawanda, Uganda. The pictures below, taken January 15 - the plants are about eight months old - are the first to be released of the future fruit. About another five years of testing will be needed to see if these plants resist the diseases - especially an airborne blight called "Black Sigatoka" - that are currently causing drastic losses in banana productivity throughout the African highlands.