Has any other instrument
of globalization ever been so tasty? First domesticated in Asia, full of fiber
and contained in its own biodegradable packaging, the lowly banana was already
being imported to the U.S. in quantities exceeding four billion a year in 1913.
But it would still be a rare treat, if not for a railroad magnate and a
small-time spice importer who pushed bananas to the East Coast masses. Dan
Koeppel's Banana: The Fate Of The Fruit That Changed The World is the fruit's proper
biography; Peter Chapman's Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped The
World, on
the other hand, focuses on a once-famous company's former banana monopoly.
Koeppel's book begins with
the birth of the domesticated banana, from Asia to Central America, where the
Gros Michel cultivar took hold as a cash crop. Desperate to protect its newly
discovered bounty, United Fruit burned through several populations of cheap
labor, lowered and raised prices to drive out competitors, and beat a hasty
retreat from ruined fields. These practices followed, and in some cases even
guided, American policy in the region, as in Nixon's use of the United
Fruit-driven revolution in Guatemala to draw up blueprints for what became the
Bay Of Pigs disaster. More pressing for Koeppel's narrative, ranging as it does
from botany to bribery and beyond, are the diseases that, unchecked by United
Fruit, snuffed out the Gros Michel and are threatening today's most popular
banana, the Cavendish; because banana plants are replanted from cuttings, and
lack the cross-pollinating that strengthens wild varieties, crops are highly vulnerable
to disease.
Both authors have room for
zany digressions: Koeppel explores the sociological origins of the Tin Pan
Alley hit "Yes, We Have No Bananas," while Chapman discusses the hippie
subculture that produced The Velvet Underground's famous banana-peel cover. Bananas! has an affect of cumulative
outrage, as the dirty acts associated with mega-corporations pile up even
before the etymology of the term "banana republic" is introduced. Koeppel is
more thoughtful and meandering in tracing the banana and various varieties,
including lab visits to the fruits of the future, though Chapman, who wrote his
undergraduate thesis on the banana business, has the reporting advantage of
several years' interviews. Chapman's tale of skullduggery is a page-turner, but
because of generations of copycat corporate malfeasance, it's all a familiar
story; Koeppel offers a more encyclopedic take on the fruit, but also offers
hope for the fruit that Bananas! is prepared to abandon as the wages of human
greed.