Dan Koeppel's Blog

Finally back from Africa. Amazing bananas, amazing stories and photos. Exhausted. No blog entries, of course – but you’ll see tons over the next few weeks. In the meantime, thanks to my buddy Rich Snodsmith – also a shirt of the month contributor – here’s Trader Joe’s holding banana prices down. Bravo – especially considering [...]

Homemade banana ice cream sammiches, Image from chubbyhubby.net
We don’t have to sit by while the “Morning Banana Diet” marches across the planet, raising prices for the fruit and making emaciated zombies of us all. Here’s a brand new recipe – from the Chubby Hubby Blog – for homemade banana ice cream, served between brownie cookies [...]

Lots of folks emailed me news items on this. Japan has gone nuts for the “Morning Banana Diet,” which promises to help you lose weight with this formula: you start in the morning with a breakfast of bananas and room-temperature water, then eat whatever you want – other than desert – the rest of the [...]

Photo: PR Newswire
Readers from other countries, you’ll just have to take my word for it: “The Banana Splits” was one of the strangest things ever presented to children as entertainment. It was an NBC show with costumes created by Sid and Marty Kroft, who might best be described as Walt Disney, split into two by [...]

Panama Disease-ravaged plantation in Asia (from Plant Health Progress.)
In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre – for the first time – publicly acknowledged the existence of Panama Disease (the incurable malady that wiped out the world’s banana crop in the first half of the 20th century, and that has devastated much [...]

Australian banana researcher James Dale. Image: QUT
Cavendish is our supermarket banana – the one that’s under threat from the newly-remerged Panama Disease (see here for more info.) The Cavendish banana is absolutely seedless and sterile, so it cannot be bred conventionally; the only sway to ensure its future as a commercial fruit would be through [...]

Battles Banana-Wielding Thug.
In my book, I note that one observer described the banana as a “weapon of conquest” in Latin America. This doesn’t apply in Maryland, where a would-be thief attempted to use the fruit to rob a 7-Eleven – and was denied by a brave clerk.
Incredibly (or maybe not so incredibly), this isn’t the [...]

A bigger threat to the banana than any disease. The world’s favorite fruit is the cheapest and healthiest alternative to junk food. So what would the junk food industry do?
This:

Gotta go try one.

The most controversial part of my book is my assertion that biotech is key to saving the banana. I came by this assertion with a lot of difficulty – initially believing that most genetic engineering in our food supply was a bad thing. But, as usual, the issue isn’t black and white. With bananas, the [...]

First good. Second, not so good.
More or less, maybe, according to the May issue of the science/tech/culture publication, because:
GMO agriculture may have a smaller carbon footprint than traditionally grown crops.
Organics may have a larger carbon footprint than traditionally grown crops.
In my book, I note that the promise of organic bananas is far less than [...]