Banana by Dan Koeppel

agricultural technicians, specially trained to recognize signs of the disease, fanned out across the countryside, hoping to teach farmers quarantine measures that slow the malady down. The biggest obstacle, a spokesperson for one of the growers said, came from small-scale, family operations. “If their fields are infected,” she said, “it will likely spread to our farms.”
    It is difficult for an individual grower to fight Panama disease. But even a large plantation can only buy time. For families working the banana fields—especially ones who have known only fighting, and are just beginning to experience even the most threadbare prosperity—there may not be enough time.

    BEYOND THE PHILIPPINES , farther into the Pacific, are bananas even more alien to us—and the rest of the world—than Lacatan. Even the tiniest islands can host a dozen or more banana types. On Pohnpei, the largest island of the Federated States of Micronesia (the landmass is about one-quarter the size of Paris), over twenty odd-looking bananas are grown. Most are short and fat, with skin sometimes as dark as crimson or purple. Their flesh can be nearly pure white (like the Utin varieties) or deep orange (like the Karat). Most Pacific bananas are related to one another, but they’re also different from the rest of the world’s, having emerged in isolation as people paddled from island to island—sometimes in canoes made from banana stalks—over a period of several millennia.
    There’s a chance that a hybrid grown from Pacific fruit may one day come to a store near you. This isn’t just because it would taste good. Bananas from this part of the world are healthier for you than any other. One of the global hallmarks of malnutrition is a lack of beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. The World Health Organization estimates that about 150 million children worldwide have vitamin A deficiencies, which can lead to blindness as well as an increase in the risk of death from malaria, measles, and diarrhea. American children, especially those living in poverty or with substandard health care, are also at risk.
    As the term implies, the best-known source of beta-carotene is carrots. Cavendish bananas have barely any. But Pohnpei’s fruit is rich in the substance. A single Utin Lap banana contains 6,000 micrograms (mcg) of beta-carotene, about the same as a carrot (and is a lot easier to grow). Even the most humble Pacific banana can contain as much as 1,000 mcg of the substance, more than the daily requirement for a child. That’s not as much as the world’s best-known orange vegetable—but which would your kid rather eat?
    The bananas that spread across the Pacific traveled north, south, and east from the Asian mainland. The word chains followed. For years, it was thought that the term for banana hadn’t gone west. Yet the huti, vud , and pudi that likely originated in New Guinea did make it one step in that direction, to East Timor—at the junction of the two oceans—where one of the local words for banana is hudi .
    Banana scientists and anthropologists still search for undiscovered words for banana. In 2001, they uncovered huti —a clear relative of the word used in the Pacific—in Tanzania, on the east coast of Africa, across six thousand miles of open ocean.

CHAPTER 7
Africa
    A CCORDING TO AFRICAN LORE, Kintu—not Adam—was the first human being. He lived alone, on the shores of Lake Victoria, watched over by Gulu, the creator of the universe. Gulu allowed his daughter, Nambi, to marry the lonely herder. But as she set out for her new, mortal life, her angry and protective brother also found his way to earth. It is his malicious presence, as the story goes, that turned the world from a paradise into a place of conflict, pain, and sickness. But there was a remedy. Kintu and Nambi would carry a banana root on their travels, and though the fruit couldn’t end