Number 15 of the year is about bananas. Like lots of people, I eat a lot of bananas. My husband puts them into our smoothies most mornings and I love to make banana bread. True, I don't really like banana flavoured things, but I do enjoy the actual banana. And like lots of people, I've never really thought about where all these bananas I eat came from.

With the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel, I now know exactly where my bananas have come from, and that its not necessarily good.

Once again, I've heard the term 'banana republic' numerous, numerous times over my life. Heck, I've used the term. Heck, I've shopped in the ubiquitous store of the same name. It's a generic term for a small, ill-governed, (usually) South American country. But once again, I never gave much thought as to where the term came from. Well this book educated me in no uncertain terms, and I'm now really, really glad that the bananas I receive in my weekly shipment from the CSA I belong to, are fare-trade.

This book is an interesting companion almost, to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Pollock's In Defense of Food as this book talks about the evils done by governments and corporations (those that became Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, etc) done to small, South American countries all in the name of growing bananas, and now, how the only way the banana may survive, is by making it entirely dependent on food science.

This book made me think about the genetic manipulation of food more so than anything else, and, as he points out in the book, like most people, I get very uncomfortable with the idea that any food I eat might have been genetically manipulated. But the thing with bananas is that they the kind we eat, the Cavendish variety, is sterile, it doesn't breed like a normal plant, rather it is basically 'cloned', but taking clippings of one plant and growing nearly identical plants from that. This is the only method of banana plant reproduction. This is fine except for a few things, one of the main one being that since the plants are all the same, they are not very hardy and are very susceptible to things. There are certain diseases out there that are busily wiping out banana plantations across the globe, threatening the banana that millions of us eat. What makes it even worse is that, while we (i.e. the Western world) could make due without our daily banana in our cereal, there are millions in countries in Africa who rely on the banana as a sustience staple, as much as some rely on wheat or rice. But this staple is also under attack, and perhaps the only way to save this fruit and the millions of lives that depend on it, is to genetically modify the banana to resist the crippling diseases and other drawbacks. But these bananas would be developed in a lab, and this makes so many uneasy.

This book is packed full of information; the history of the banana, the history of the fruit companies and the countries they helped basically destroy in order to grow numerous, cheap bananas; and of course, the uncertain future of the banana. One thing is for sure, I'll never take another banana for granted again.