Banana (3 page)

I
F YOU WERE TO DRAW A MAP
showing the earliest human efforts to remove bananas from the wild and grow them in the gardens and plowed terraces of prehistory, it would, appropriately, resemble the shape of a banana. The elongated oval would enclose the equator. India would be at the fruit's stem. From there, a bulging line would trace northeast, just encompassing Taiwan and coastal southern China before turning south. It would brush Sri Lanka and trace the Sunda Arc, a fiery ring of volcanic islands and coastline where the India and Burma continental plates grind into each other. It would include all of Southeast Asia, the Malay Peninsula, and the Philippines. Borneo would be near the oval's center. The curve would terminate at northern Australia and the edges of the Coral Sea, just west of the Great Barrier Reef. Most of this area is ocean. But somewhere along the strips of land that dot this perimeter the first banana farms emerged. Kuk Swamp, an obscure swath of wetland no bigger than your average shopping mall, is one of those likely spots.

Today, the marshy patch is tucked between mountain ridges, deep in a green valley. The surrounding peaks are not high, but they form an imposing rampart, running along the spine of Papua New Guinea. Wind and moisture rush in from the ocean, bringing rain—sometimes almost constant rain—to the bottomlands. Even now, this area is a riot of biodiversity, with hundreds of unique species of birds, flowers, and insects. Seven thousand years ago, this land was as rich and fertile as anywhere else on earth, at anytime in history.

The swamp is not hard to find. It is just a few miles from the modern town of Mount Hagen, which is famous for an annual festival where dozens of members of different highland aboriginal groups gather to dance and celebrate (it began in the 1950s as a way to encourage rival tribal groups to work out their differences without violence). Attendees display a stunning array of traditional costume—body piercings, tattoos, and varying kinds of headgear and jewelry, each representing a different aboriginal division. The native occupants of the area—the festival's home team, if you will—are the Melpa, a social group that numbers about sixty thousand. The first encounter between the Melpa and outsiders—even others from New Guinea—happened only seventy years ago.

Against the backdrop of both recorded and geographical history, Kuk Swamp is a relatively new feature. Before humans arrived, it was mostly grassland. But as global temperatures rose following the end of the last ice age, melting glaciers released huge amounts of water. The moist, rich land gave rise to deep forests, all across the planet.

In the warmest parts of the world—the fertile crescent along the Mediterranean and the tropical coastlands along the great banana-shaped map—people found that it was easier to grow what they ate than to go search for it, and that meant they needed to stay close to the crops they were tending. They needed to settle down. They needed to create, for the first time, villages. Kuk Swamp is one place where this happened: Before almost anywhere else in the world, people there emerged from the wild and found ways to live with each other in an agricultural community.

THE EARLIEST SCIENTISTS TO ARRIVE
in Kuk Swamp didn't expect to find an ancient farm. Their mission was to investigate whether the area could be used for modern agriculture. Yet, starting in the 1970s, as they dug through the terrain, they realized they wouldn't be the first to take advantage of this fertile landscape. There were no pottery shards, burial sites, or human remains hidden beneath the soil. Instead, twenty feet down, investigators found the remnants of a collective garden: over two hundred primitive drainage ditches, traces of ancient plowing, and holes that once held posts made from felled trees. The discoveries turned the site from what scientists described as a “Neolithic backwater” into an anthropological breakthrough: Until Kuk Swamp, the conventional wisdom was that farming societies likely originated in mainland Asia. But the farm at Kuk Swamp was more than three thousand years older than the earliest supposed time of contact between the two regions. “Only a few regions [in the world] were suited to become the homelands of full agricultural systems,” wrote German archaeobotanist Katharina Neumann. “New Guinea seems to have been one of them.”

Those discoveries quickly yielded an understanding of what the earliest people to live there
did
. But it seemed impossible to know exactly
what
they were growing in the tilled soil scientists were unearthing. Bananas don't leave fossils (toss one onto your front lawn on a hot summer day, and you'll see why). Vegetable roots usually rot away, leaving no indication of their presence. But if you're very determined, and willing to take the time to look, traces can be found: miniscule, ghostly shadows, which can last for thousands of years.

The word
phytolith
literally means “plant stone.” A phytolith is a minuscule sandlike body that forms in a stem as it rises from the ground. The tiny grains mold themselves to the plant's cells, creating an impression as accurate as a plaster casting (and beautiful under the microscope; geologists often compare them to opals). Phytoliths are fingerprintlike evidence of a particular plant's presence, left in place, right where the plant grew, once the actual organism has died and rotted away. The challenge with phytoliths is their size. A frozen-in-time tyrannosaur isn't hard to identify. Determining whether an antediluvian grain of sand came from a banana is more difficult.

In 2002, in what sounds like one of the most tedious and painstaking jobs in the history of science, Australian researchers sifted through tons of soil dug from Kuk Swamp's ancient trenches, gathering and sorting thousands of phytoliths. They then compared them to a control group of samples from bananas found in contemporary New Guinea. The visual examination corroborated the identity of the tiny stones. Their presence confirmed that this small, ancient village—one of the first on earth—grew bananas.

THE NEXT QUESTION IS HOW AND WHY
those early farmers managed to do that. Wild bananas are so inedible that biting into one can send you screaming to the dentist, so it seems odd that people would attempt to cultivate the fruit at all. One possible answer, according to Edmond De Langhe—a Belgian botanist who has spent the past fifty years combing the jungles and forests of the world's equatorial regions for undiscovered wild bananas—lies with the subterranean part of the fruit: the corm. Though it tastes something like a wooden turnip, the corm can be cooked and used as a starchy vegetable. You'd have to be very hungry to do so, but that condition was as common in prehistory as it is today. In Africa, people still turn to the corm during times of famine.

The hunters and gatherers of ancient New Guinea might have started by eating this part—then the only edible portion—of the banana. A changeover to cultivation could have begun when a few of the plants yielded mutated fruit, most likely with fewer rock-hard seeds. These variations could quickly have been selected and grown. Forest was likely cleared and fields tilled. Eventually, as bananas became sweeter and bigger, corms would have become mostly what they are today: the base material for something much more delicious. At Kuk Swamp, as well as in Malaysia, China, and possibly India—all along the fruit-shaped arc—the banana was eventually transformed from a wild foodstuff into a staple.

I
T MAY SEEM ODD
to jump from a concept so ancient—farming—to one so supremely modern: genetics. And yet, before we continue with our story, exploring just how the banana went from being a primordial crop to a ubiquitous cereal accessory, it's helpful to know something about the fruit's genes, its family tree.

It was a desire to learn more about the banana's genetic heritage that, in 2004, took me from the plantations in Honduras to the world's preeminent banana research facility—far from Central America and Papua New Guinea and even the United States—in the bustling town of Leuven, Belgium.

THE BANANAS I SOUGHT OUT IN BELGIUM
are both artifacts of the past and hope for the future. After my flight from Los Angeles landed in Brussels, I boarded a commuter train, and—after fifteen minutes of staring from a rain-streaked window onto a chilly, industrial landscape—I arrived in the town of Leuven. I exited the main station, walked across the town square, and checked into my hotel. A few minutes later, I was on the city's Number Two bus. The destination, CAMPUS, was posted on the windshield, and the vehicle was standing-room only, full of students. We made our way through the town's market plaza, passing the ornate city hall, built in 1438, with over two hundred sculpted gothic statues on its stone facade. They depict artists and scientists, a tribute to the city's academic heritage: Leuven has been a college town for over five centuries. Cartographer Gerardus Mercator, whose flattened, orange-peel map of the world is still in use today, studied at Leuven. In 1517, over a millennium after Saint Jerome conducted his own linguistic enterprise for the Holy See, the university launched Europe's first post-Enlightenment foreign languages curriculum, where students learned to translate between Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Today, Leuven is the world capital of banana research. The university's Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement is run by Rony Swennen—he's tall, thin, and looks a bit rugged, like the banana explorer he once was (he was made an honorary tribal chief in Nigeria for helping a local village grow the fruit). His lab holds the world's largest collection of the fruit's genetic material, gathered from both wild and cultivated specimens.

About thirty students and technicians work there. They come from around the world, but especially from banana-growing nations. The countries provide education sponsorship. When the young scientists return, they'll go to work improving and protecting local crops.

The Leuven holdings—genetic material in dishes and hundreds of tiny plantlets held in test tubes—are housed in a series of cryogenic vats and refrigerated rooms in the basement of Swennen's facility (the only full-grown bananas in Leuven are in the small, attached greenhouse). But you can get a good idea of what the collection contains without putting on a parka by examining what's essentially the banana version of a museum catalog. The “Musalogue” (
Musa
being Linnaeus's genus designation for banana) is over two hundred pages long. It begins with a brief summary of how the fruit is named and classified. There's also a handy glossary and a pictorial reference to the parts of the banana. But the heart of the “Musalogue” is its gazetteer of the world's 172 known banana accessions—the primary banana types held as samples for breeding and study. The Cavendish, our banana, is found on Chapter 11; the particular variety of Cavendish we eat, called Williams (that's one of the ones with the Chiquita label), is described as having a “milky sap” and flowers that are cream, rust, yellow, and white. The apex of the Williams Cavendish is “lengthily pointed,” and the fruit is “curved upward.” The reference sample in the book was originally grown in South Johnstone, Australia. Three other Cavendish varieties are noted: the Petite and Grande Naine (translated: small and large dwarf ) from the Caribbean, and the Dwarf Parfitt, part of the Belgium assortment. The Cavendish types vary slightly in appearance and taste, but genetically they're identical twins. A few identifiable differences are evident, but they have the same DNA and thus the same traits, strengths, and weaknesses.

I SPENT FIVE DAYS AT THE LAB
,
commuting back and forth in the rain, eating at the school cafeteria, and—every day for almost the whole day—using the copying machine to make duplicates of hundreds of pages of banana research papers, some dating back more than a century. They were records of long-ago banana collecting forays in Asia and Africa; they detailed the very first efforts by scientists to create “improved” (the word used to describe human efforts to find new breeds) versions of the fruit; and the modern ones illuminated the discovery of the fruit's most obscure genetic secrets. I met with the banana students and struggled through explanations of banana heredity. At night I sat in a local tavern, drinking Belgian beer and studying the oversized directory.

The “Musalogue” also maps out the banana family tree, which looks less like something from an orchard and more like a pyramid, with wild bananas and related species at the bottom and the fruit that we consume at the narrowed top. The banana is part of a larger plant order known as the Zingiberales, which, as the name slightly implies, includes ginger as well as turmeric and the banana-like traveler's palm. (Ginger is another ancient plant whose destiny is irrevocably tied to humans. Though it probably first appeared in India about five thousand years ago, the world today is completely devoid of any truly wild version of the root-based spice.)

A level up, the family Musacae divides into Linnaeus's
Musa
, and a lesser-known cousin called the “false banana,” or
Ensete
. False bananas are grown mostly in East Africa, not for fruit, but for their corm, which is slightly better tasting than a true banana's corm, especially when fermented, baked, and served as
kocho
—a flat bread similar to the kind you'll find at an Ethiopian restaurant.

Another step up the pyramid moves us closer to our bananas. There are four types of
Musa
, but the ones we eat come from just two of them: Australimusa and Eumusa. Australimusa are rare and delicious. You may have tried one if you've been to Fiji or Tahiti, where they're known as
fe'i
. On the tree, they ooze a magenta sap, a hue no other banana comes close to generating (no matter what the color, banana sap is among the most sticky and stubborn substances on earth. You will never get it off your clothes). They have a rich texture and strong, even complex taste; multiple tones of flavor come through in each bite; many have orange flesh and are nearly as fat as they are long, giving them a mangolike shape. Except for these island fruits, the banana everyone else eats is of the Eumusa type. There are eleven species of Eumusa, but our banana cultivars (the term is a combination of
cultivated
and
variety
) occupy an even more narrow level restricted to two species:
Musa acuminata
and
Musa balbisiana
, abbreviated as A and B.

From there, basic genetics take over. Different banana cultivars contain different combinations of A and B genes. Wild bananas, and a few edible ones, are AA, containing two sets of like chromosomes. AB and other combination bananas are usually the result of human hybridization. Our Cavendish is an AAA banana (hybrid plants can have more than two sets of chromosomes). So was the Gros Michel that preceded it. Nearly all sweet bananas, as well as those grown for beer making in Africa, are also AAA. Most plantains are AAB.
*

Any combination other than an AA banana is not found in nature's original stock of the fruit. It was either consciously bred or grew from a wild mutant and was then brought to plantations. There are now very few parts of the world where AA bananas make up any portion of the daily diet. Of the twelve listed in the “Musalogue,” nine are from New Guinea, one is from the Philippines, and another is of unknown origin. The twelfth, called Pisang Mas, is a staple in Malaysia. The reason the Leuven banana collection and the “Musalogue” exist is not just to show what a broad foundation our few bananas are built on. The Leuven samples are kept for a more important reason: hope—that one of them, somehow, will help reduce the fruit's vulnerability, that it can be bred to create a new banana that tastes good, grows well, and resists disease. But progress has been slow, and the search for undiscovered bananas continues. In the meantime, though the number of bananas people consume rises every year, into uncountable billions, genetically they're all still crowded into one very small, very frail, basket.