IF YOU ARE AN AVERAGE AMERICAN, about forty years old, you’re probably approaching banana ten thousand, just as I am. You’ve probably never given the fruit much thought, and until recently neither had I. Bananas had always just been here, waiting to be purchased, waiting to be enjoyed. Bananas were likely the first fruit you ate as an infant, and they may be the last fruit you eat in old age. To most of us, a banana is just a banana: yellow and sweet, universally sized, always seedless.

I first began thinking about bananas in 2003, after reading a small story in a magazine called New Scientist. I was fascinated by what the article revealed: that bananas are more loved, consumed, and needed than any other fruit on earth; that Americans eat more bananas per year than apples and oranges combined; and that in many other parts of the world, bananas—more than rice, more than potatoes—are what keep hundreds of millions of people alive The story also talked about a disease spreading throughout the world’s banana crop—a blight with no known cure.

Surprised by how little mainstream publicity the disease was getting, I pitched a story on the banana to Popular Science magazine, to which I frequently contribute. I wanted to write something that picked up where that original article left off: showing that the banana blight was on the verge of becoming a major agricultural crisis and explaining how it happened.

While researching the article, I traveled to Honduras and spent a week on a banana plantation. What I discovered there, however, was abundance. Where were the shrunken banana plants, their diseased remains? Where were the dark and deserted farms? There seemed to be nothing wrong with the rows and rows of bananas down there, or anywhere in Central and South America, which is where nearly all of the bananas eaten in the United States come from.

It was this seeming paradox that compelled me to learn more about the banana. The more I researched, the more it became clear that there’s nothing we eat—that the world eats—more paradoxical than the banana. The humble treat we pack into our lunchboxes is among the most complex crops cultivated by humans. In ancient times, the fruit helped the earliest farmers put down roots and establish communities. In the modern era, the banana—literally—has destroyed nations and ruined lives.

The plantation I visited in Honduras is the product of all that history and contradiction. But it—and the bananas grown in similar places across the globe—is threatened. The disease I couldn’t see in Honduras is spreading. There is an epidemic underway, one far more ominous than I’d realized. In a matter of decades, it could essentially wipe out the fruit that so many of us love and rely on.

ALMOST EVERYTHINC I LEARNED ABOUT THE BANANA was surprising. For all its ubiquity, the banana is truly one of the most intriguing organisms on earth. A banana tree isn’t a tree at all; it’s the world’s largest herb. The fruit itself is actually a giant berry. Most of us eat just a single kind of banana, a variety called the Cavendish, but over one thousand types of banana are found worldwide, including dozens of wild varieties, many no bigger than your pinky and filled with tooth-shattering seeds. The banana’s original migration from Asia to Africa and finally to our breakfast tables is a tangle of the known and unknown, as is the fruit’s evolution, over millennia, from a handful of jungle species to a complex farmed plant with a unique reproductive system. (The bananas we eat today never reproduce on their own. They must have human assistance.) Bananas were one of the earliest plants to be cultivated by humans—they were first farmed more than seven thousand years ago—and they remain one of the most important: They are the world’s largest fruit crop and the fourth-largest product grown overall, after wheat, rice, and corn.

The banana’s past is also rich with historical significance. At the end of the nineteenth century, a few rugged and ruthless entrepreneurs built a market for a product most Americans had never heard of. The fruit proved to be a commercial miracle. Within twenty years, bananas had surpassed apples to become America’s best seller, despite the fact that the banana is a tropical product that rots easily and needs to be shipped up to thousands of miles, while apples grow within a few hours of most U.S. cities. The companies that are the direct ancestors of today’s Chiquita and Dole—founded by those early banana barons—had to invent ways to bring bananas out of dense jungle and to control and delay ripening throughout the fruit’s long distribution chain, all the way to local markets. The companies cleared rain forests, laid railroad track, and built entire cities. They invented not just radio networks but entire technologies—some still in use today—to allow communication between plantations and cargo vessels approaching port. Banana fleets were the first vessels with built-in refrigeration and banana companies the first to use controlled atmospheres and piped-in chemicals to delay ripening. None of these innovations, now in wide use, existed before bananas; there was no such thing as a “fruit industry.” Apples and oranges and cherries and grapes were supplied by small farms and regional distributors.

Everywhere bananas have appeared, they’ve changed the cultures that embraced them. In the most ancient translations of the Bible, the “apple” consumed by Eve in the Garden of Eden is the more suggestive banana. In the African nations surrounding Lake Victoria, the word for food, translated from Swahili, is also the word for banana. In Central America, bananas built and toppled nations: a struggle to control the banana crop led to the overthrow of Guatemala’s first democratically elected government in the 1950s, which in turn gave birth to the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. In the 1960s, banana companies—trying to regain plantations nationalized by Fidel Castro—allowed the CIA to use their freighters as part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Over and over again, the banana is linked with triumph and tragedy: Banana workers in Honduras wrote epic novels, poems, and songs about the difficult conditions they worked under. Eli Black, the chairman of Chiquita, threw himself out the window of a Manhattan skyscraper in 1974 after his company’s political machinations were exposed. The term banana republic reflects the excess of influence banana producers wielded throughout the twentieth century.

THE BANANA THAT IS DYING, the Cavendish, is the most popular single variety of fruit in the world. It is the one that you and nearly everyone you know eats today. But, as I first learned through my research for Popular Science, it’s not the fruit your grandparents enjoyed. That banana was called the Gros Michel, which translates as “Big Mike.” By all accounts, Big Mike was a more spectacular banana than our Cavendish. It was larger, with a thicker skin, a creamier texture, and a more intense, fruity taste. It was the original banana that arrived at American tables, and from the late nineteenth century until after World War H, it was the only banana Americans bought, ate, or thought of.

But the Gros Michel disappeared. A disease began to ravage banana crops not long after the first banana trees were planted in Central America. The malady was discovered in Panama and named after that country. Panama disease—actually a fungus—is particularly virulent. It is transmitted through soil and water. Once it hits a plantation, it quickly destroys, and then moves on.

The reason Panama disease is so devastating isn’t just because the malady is strong. It is also because bananas, at their core, are weak. That’s another contradiction, because everything we see or can intuitively conclude about the banana implies the opposite. Our banana’s thick skin makes the fruit tough enough to survive not only being stacked in boxes on the way to the grocery but also being tossed over the back of a mule in Ecuador or strapped in bunches to a motor scooter bumping through a humid, dense plantation in the Philippines. Unlike peaches or plums, bananas all ripen at nearly the same rate, arriving at the store green and cycling from yellow to flecked with brown in almost exactly seven days. There is no fruit more consistent or reliable, which is one of the reasons we eat so many of them. A banana’s taste and visual appearance are as predictable as a Big Mac’s.

There’s a simple explanation for this, and you can find it—or, more accurately, can’t find it—when you peel a banana: no seeds. You will never, ever find a seed in a supermarket banana. That is because the fruit is grown, basically, by cloning. One banana begets another in a process similar to taking a cutting from a rosebush—and multiplying it by a billion. Every banana we eat is a genetic twin of every other, whether that banana is grown in Ecuador, where most of our fruit comes from; in the Canary Islands, which supply Europe; or in Australia, Taiwan, or Malaysia. The banana sliced into Swiss muesli is the same one we cut into Rice Krispies. The banana Hong Kong action star Stephen Chow slipped on in Shaolin Soccer (2001) is as identical to its cohorts as the Gros Michel that caused a pratfall in The Pilgrim (1923), starring Charlie Chaplin, was to its brethren.

Yet because every banana is the same, every banana is equally susceptible: Billions of identical twins means that what makes one banana sick makes every banana sick.
That’s what happened to the Gros Michel. Panama disease spread from the country in which it was first discovered to neighboring nations, moving north through Costa Rica all the way to Guatemala and south into Colombia and Ecuador. The process took decades. By 1960, fifty years after the malady was first discovered, the Gros Michel was effectively extinct. The banana industry was in crisis, itself threatened with disappearance. It was only at the last minute that a new banana was adopted.

The Cavendish was immune to Panama disease, and in a few years the devastated plantations resumed business as usual. The change happened so quickly and smoothly that consumers barely noticed. The Gros Michel era ended not just with a new banana but with an assumption: The old banana, now gone, was uniquely frail. Cavendish, convenient and delicious, was strong.

But it wasn’t strength that kept the Cavendish healthy. It was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Many of the world’s non-Cavendish varieties of bananas—eaten and grown in Asia and Africa, in India, through the islands of the South Pacific, all the way to Australia and New Zealand—are also susceptible to Panama disease. When the malady hits, it is always devastating. The difference is that these are local bananas. They may provide sustenance for an entire Pakistani state or a single village in Uganda, but because their growing area is limited, many outbreaks simply reach a dead end.

This was even true with the Gros Michel, though the biological cul-de-sac was a big one: an entire hemisphere. Panama disease never moved across the Atlantic or Pacific because the commercial banana crop didn’t mingle with the fruit people grew and ate closer to their homes. But the Cavendish was introduced into a different, faster-moving world. At first, it was grown in the same places as its predecessor. But by the end of the 1970s, the world’s appetite for bananas began to change. Populations across the globe were moving to cities, and if they wanted the fruit, they needed one that could be transported great distances intact, ready to ripen, and with consistent enough taste to be a reliable performer on greengrocers’ shelves.
One such place was Malaysia. Cavendish plantations were new to the country in the 1980s, but they quickly became big business. Thousands of acres of rain forest and former palm oil plantations were being shifted to banana production, the first time the fruit was grown on a commercial scale in that part of Asia. But within a few years of breaking ground, the newly planted fruit began to die. An unknown pathogen was working its way into the roots of the plant, discoloring leaves, and choking off water supplies.

It took several years for scientists to identify the malady, and it came as a shock: Panama disease, hitting the banana variety that was supposed to be invulnerable. It took longer, still, to discover why. It turned out that the Cavendish had never actually been immune to the blight—only to 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 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.