Dan Koeppel

I walked into the front doors of my local library, and there was this book. It was one of the featured books on some library summer theme. I couldn't resist picking it up.

I had completed my doctoral thesis on Guatemala, a country considered to be one of the Central American Banana Republics, and was well aware of United Fruit's horrendous involvement, with U.S. government complicity and support, in Guatemala's insurrection, war, genocide, and corruption. United Fruit is now Chiquita and, show more for the most part, it is a vastly more ethical conglomerate than it was before. Still, it's known underhandedness in establishing relationships with brutal rebels and dictators continued into the late 1990s. (I remain skeptical that the underhandedness has abated.) Building from Bitter fruit: The story of the American coup in Guatemala (Schlesinger, Kinder, & Coatsworth, 2005), Banana more greatly details how American preference for the popular, cheap fruit is responsible for lots of poverty and death that Americans easily dismiss for the convenience of having the fruit in our markets. It is not lost on me that the fruit is now a staple in convenience stores selling for around $.78 per banana (!!) when a whole pound of bananas costs about as much. I can guarantee 7-11 does not share that huge profit margin with the Central American growers. As Koeppel concludes, unless we can tear ourselves away from convenience in support of locally grown and seasonal produce, Banana Republics will continue to exist.

I also had a less moral, more personal reason for picking up the book. My Grandson adores the fruit. He is a very picky eater though he will eat almost any fruit you put in front of him. Bananas are his favorite fruit and, at only 1.5 years old, will easily eat three bananas for breakfast unless we intervene to fight an egg or cereal into his mouth. Bananas were actually a prominent theme of our recent Hawaiian vacation. Our family visited the Dole plantation and pointed out the banana trees much to his delight. At another plantation we ate a delicious banana-apple variety that he found absolutely scrumptious. We even tried to buy a bunch still on the stalk so Grandson could pick them himself (we never located one). Finding Banana filled in the gaps between plantation and state-side supermarket. It was interesting for me to learn how bananas are grown and how fighting plant infections are extremely difficult. I am now my Grandson's personal banana expert.

Don't expect a great, personal revelation or resolution about the apparent conflict between Banana Republics and my Grandson's tummy. I don't have one. I am certain my Grandson would be fine enjoying local produce if bananas disappeared from our groceries. But, it is hard not to buy them when he reaches for them from his perch in the shopping cart. At the moment, I hope as consumers we can insist our businesses act more morally and ethically even while I understand with that hope I am slipping on a proverbial banana peel. With that hope I am essentially passing the buck directly into the pockets of Chiquita and Dole. show less

I thoroughly enjoyed this book for multiple reasons, but I want to enumerate two:

Firstly, I loved the true cross section of the banana. Of all the topics he covered, particularly, I found it admirable how Koeppel explains the biological history of the banana (ex: how does a seedless banana procreate? how did we get to a seedless banana?) while remaining, for me, entertaining. Not every writer can/wants to make evolutionary biology thrilling. He also covers the historical distribution of show more bananas, the cultural significances across the globe, the story of the banana within U.S. history, and more. And I loved it all.

Secondly, the sheer breadth of documents Koeppel reviewed, interviewed conducted, and life experiences encountered and shared all relating to the frigging banana is astounding. It's clear that the book comes from a place founded in both passion of knowledge and passion of the banana. To a regular ol' chum on the street, "passion for the banana" may sound strange; I think it is abnormal, but as Koeppel reminds us in the book, EVERYONE has a minor passion for the banana. That personal narrative mixed into the historical perspectives simply hits the spot.

I love this book. show less

Read Dan Koeppel's Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (Hudson Street Press, 2008), and I bet you'll never look at a banana quite the same way again. Expanding on a 2005 Popular Science article, Koeppel's book is a biological, political and commercial history of the banana. It is also a call to action, since the banana as we know it may be just years away from disappearing completely thanks to a fast-moving series of pathogens which have the potential to bring its reign atop show more the fruit bowl to a precipitous end.

Part travelogue, part exposé, part history lesson, Koeppel's book takes us from the banana plantations to Latin America to the village plots of Africa to the research labs of Belgium, where scientists are racing against time to combat the spreading plague and make the world safe for bananas. What remains to be seen is whether the ultimately successful fruit will be the variety we currently eat (the Cavendish), or if some other version will have to be (or even can be) modified to meet the consumer needs the Cavendish currently satisfies (easily transported, hard to bruise, on a regular ripening schedule). It's happened before; the variety of banana grown and marketed until the late 1950s was the Gros Michel, which succumbed to the same cocktail of diseases our current banana faces today.

The banana's checkered past is laid bare here as Koeppel peels away the decades of nefarious practices engaged in by the large banana companies in Central and South America and the Caribbean as they fought each other for the commercial edge (and in the process greatly abused their works, the environment, and the governments of the nations they practically controlled). And Koeppel's point about the inherent weaknesses of the banana as an export crop is a good one: if we followed the precepts of locavorism, the banana would be about the last thing most of us would be eating, and perhaps that's the way it should be. But, as he writes, that seems unlikely, so perhaps at least understanding what's behind what we're eating is the best we can do for now.

A worthy book; I learned a great deal.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/03/book-review-banana.html show less

The other day, I was having my weekly coffee with friends when one of them said to me, (in relation to a FB post of mine she’d recently seen): “You’ve become a real Twitcher, haven’t you?”

I hadn’t started this book yet, but my answer was a resounding “no” for several reasons, though it was hard to really define them for her. Now that I have finished this book, it’s much easier, and I’ll get back to that at the end of my post.

To See Every Bird on Earth is meant to be, if show more you believe what it says on the wrapper, a book that explores the thrill of the chase across the world to witness as many of the earth’s birds as possible in a lifetime. There’s some of that, but mostly, it’s the culmination of what I’m guessing was a lot of therapy for the author; a psychological catharsis of his family’s dysfunction, written and published. In many ways, this book was marketed to the wrong demographic; those that find personal substance in others’ stories about personal journeys would find a lot to like in this book. Needless to say, it’s not my jam.

BUT having said that, in between the family drama being laid bare, there was a lot of interesting insight into the world of Big Listers. Big Listers are those that have seen thousands of the known species of birds in the world. Known species is a moving target, and is currently around 10 thousand. The biggest Big Lister has seen over 8 thousand. This is about big numbers, big money, and big obsessions – and very little about the birds. Koeppel, when he focuses on these people, does a better than credible job getting into their heads and their world and it was fascinating for me, in a rubber-necking kind of way. The chance to see the birds these people have seen is tantalising; how they go about it, like a military invasion, isn’t.

And ultimately, this is why I’m not a twitcher, neither of the hobby sized or obsessive Big Lister variety. True, I have the list of birds in my state, and I do check them off when I see them, noting the time and place. But I don’t count, I don’t plan, set goals, or study, and I’m embarrassed at how few bird songs I can identify after the 10 years I’ve spent tramping around the bush – and at how easily I can confuse myself over identifications.

But I have no desire to ‘do better’ because my hazy goal, set when I started this and unchanged since, isn’t to just see the birds. When I moved to Australia, not knowing how long I’d be here, I wanted to see Australia, I wanted to experience this place so far away from the rest of the world on so many levels. Looking for birds (which are, let’s be honest, the low-hanging fruit of the wildlife tree), makes me look up, down, and into the bush; I have to actually explore my surroundings, and in doing that I come much closer to actually experiencing this amazing land. The added bonus: not only have I seen (and am seeing) Australia in a way that will stay with me, but I have a new found sense of wonder wherever I go, including home to Florida. I apparently lived 90% of my life alongside hundreds of bird species I never knew about because I never paid attention. And by looking for the birds, I’m finding an entire world of wildlife right there for me to appreciate (or not, in the case of some).

So while I didn’t enjoy To See Every Bird on Earth as much as I’d hoped, I do thank its author for helping me clarify in my own mind my motivations for my avian hobby that definitely isn’t bird-watching. show less