Dan Koeppel's Blog

The corporate banana monoculture, based on the Cavendish variety – which accounts for 99% of the world’s export crop – is both doomed and dangerous. Diseases are striking the world crop, forcing increased used of pesticides (when the diseases are curable, which isn’t always the case.) Reliance on a single, commodity fruit makes it impossible [...]

The reason we have only one kind of banana – out of the 1,000+ found worldwide – is partly an issue of transportation: every banana type ripens differently and has widely varying levels of fragility. In the 1950s, when the “original” commercial banana, the Gros Michel, was going functionally extinct, Dole came up with the [...]

The following is the original English text of an article I wrote for Dagens Nyheter, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden. The story is about Dole’s attempt to stop the distribution of “BANANAS!*”, a documentary made by Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten that the banana company believes to be untrue. The film is about lawsuits filed [...]

Philippine Lacatan banana tree at market – from the extensive and fascinating Market Manilla website. The Lacatan is the Philippine’s “comfort food” banana, and one of the world’s most delicious.
One of the most frustrating elements of fighting banana disease (or any disease) is that quarantine actually works – but only in theory. For over a [...]

Images from Oke’s Flickr photostream.

To assist washed-out Ecuadorean banana farmers, fair-trade importer Oke is taking donations to buy a Bobcat earth-mover. It’s a worthy cause. Read about it here.
More on fair trade, Ecuador’s floods, and rising banana prices here, here, here, and especially here.

The “Fort Knox of Food.” From the International Herald Tribune.
The recent publicity about the opening of the “Global Seed Vault” in Longyearbyen, Norway, has prompted some questions about whether or not bananas are included. The vault is 500 meters deep, buried under a snow-capped mountain, and is filled with over a hundred million (!!!) different [...]

“Cuando las Miradas no Alcanzan,” 47×47″, oil on canvas, 2005

“Unaited gui Stand,” 92 x 44 inches, oil on canvas, 2003*

Gonzalo is an artist from Colombia, site of some of the must brutal violence in the sad history of the Banana Republics. His grandfather worked for United Fruit (Chiquita), and tried – Gonzolo told me in [...]

You’d cry, too.
Researchers in New Zealand and Japan have engineered what they describe as a “tear-free” onion, according to a report from the AFP wire service. The happy onion was developed by the Crop and Food Research institute. The lead scientist on the project, Colin Eady, described how it was done:

“We previously thought the tearing [...]

My friend Tim lived in Costa Rica for almost five years. He confirms not just that our simian relatives eat bananas, but also how they eat them:

“As I remember, they ate them upside down. Used their teeth to pull apart the peel. Bigger monkeys would bite chunks off or/and the smaller monkeys would break off [...]

Note: This entry originally appeared on the Penguin authors’ blog, which I contributed to this week.

If you’ve bought my book, then you know that the subject – saving the banana from a disease that currently threatens it – has, as its background, the notion of monoculture: relying on a single crop, rather than diverse ones, [...]