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

http://www.amazon.com/Banana-Fate-Fruit-Changed-World/dp/1594630380

It's not quite the same plant. The first variety to be exported was wiped out by disease back in the 1950's. I agree with everything else though.

>From a book review on Amazon:

>This is because we buy one banana, the Cavendish which has good properties to make it transportable and long-lasting, but that it forms almost all the world's commercially cultured bananas is its weakness, perhaps a dangerous one. We have been through this before; the Cavendish is not your grandparent's banana. The one they ate was the Gros Michel (Big Mike) banana, which was the monoculture banana of its time until, as one-species crops tend to do, it caught a bad disease, Panama Disease, a fungus that was discovered in that country and then spread worldwide. Bananas by that time had become a worldwide trade, and especially in South America the big companies got the dictators to agree about the dangers of rights for the banana workers, and of labor unions, and the American government helped out. There is new bad news for bananas: Cavendish bananas are now succumbing to Panama disease, as did their predecessor, and the disease is rapidly being transported worldwide. Koeppel maintains that there is one prospect of a solution, and that is genetic modification. GM is regarded with horror as producing "frankenfood", but it is in the banana that it could be used with the least risk. Proprietary seeds won't be developed, both because seeds are hard to come by and because scientists working on the banana genome have agreed that any resultant fruit will be in the public domain. Bananas, which have no seeds or pollen, are at little risk for allowing their modifications to escape into the wild.

>Something will have to be done if we want our bananas, and we do want them: we eat more of them than apples and oranges combined. No more bananas would mean a gustatory loss for Americans but a nutritional disaster for Africa and other parts of the world where locally-grown bananas are a staple rather than a snack. The Cavendish was in the wings ready to take the stage when the Gros Michel was slain, and now that the Cavendish may go the same way, there is no understudy waiting to take over.

It's an interesting book: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

I'll jump on the commodity history bandwagon: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World Fascinating read.

Add me to the list of people who are curious about this. Were you on NPR, OP?

Ah, a few posts down he mentions he wrote this book.

And this is the link to the NPR story.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.

This article is basically a summary of this book:

Banana: The Fate of The Fruit That Changed The World

A very good book and worth the read.

There are a few out there but this is the one to which I was referring: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel

Here's a downloadable pdf