BANANA

A thousand years ago, a Christian missionary whose name we do not know happened upon a curious fruit in a North African marketplace. It tasted wonderful and strange, he wrote to his bishop in Rome, and the fruit, which the natives called anana, was perfect. For, he continued, if you slice it horizontally, you will see in each segment a reminder of the Christian faith: a cross, a sure sign of the grace of God.

Cut a banana open, and sure enough, you will find in the tiny black seeds a cross—or, if you prefer, a Zuni or Tibetan sun symbol. For that reason, the banana often turns up in religious imagery wherever it has traveled. In its homeland of Southeast Asia, where it ranks as a major foodstuff on a par with rice, millet, and wheat, the banana appears in many Buddhist scriptures as an example of the world’s generosity, for it grows abundantly and feeds millions.  As it spread eastward to the Arab nations and Africa and westward to Polynesia, it took on significance in other beliefs. Some Muslim and Christian traditions hold that the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve so briefly enjoyed in the Garden of Eden was not the apple, which is not native to the Persian Gulf region, but the banana, which has grown there since antiquity. Paintings from those traditions show the first man and woman wearing not fig or apple leaves, as medieval European iconography would have it, but banana leaves to hide their nakedness. Our missionary and his brethren knew a good thing when they saw it. They returned to Italy with banana plants, and soon farmers were busily exporting fruit, and then plants, to Spain, where, under Moorish rule, banana cultivation was widespread. Following the reconquista, perhaps associating bananas with the departed Muslim rulers, Iberia’s Catholic rulers did nothing to encourage production, which moved offshore; the Canary Islands, under Portuguese rule, became one important center of banana cultivation. From there, plants were taken to the New World, to be planted on the island of Hispaniola, from which banana cultivation fanned out across the Caribbean and into South America.  Few Europeans at home could enjoy that particular treasure of their colonies, however: until refrigeration systems were developed in the mid-nineteenth century, the fruit could not survive the ocean crossing. When refrigeration did arrive, bananas became big business. In 1885, the Boston Fruit Company—later known as the United Fruit Company —began importing the banana to the United States, mostly by way of New Orleans via ‘‘banana boats’’ that brought along with their cargo the tarantulas and boa constrictors that now thrive in the bayous of the Mississippi Delta.  Until the Dole Company set up shop in Hawaii, the Massachusetts importer protected its monopoly by supporting a series of Central and South American strongman governments. One was Nicaragua, which a clever journalist dubbed a ‘‘banana republic,’’ giving us a new term for a dictatorship. The system of political patronage had at least one desired effect, as far as the corporations were concerned: bananas became so common an element in the American diet that by 1911 the Boy Scout Handbook suggested that a particularly good deed—given how lethal the things apparently were in those days—would be to clear the streets of banana peels. (Apart from its role in comedic pratfalls, has a banana peel ever killed anyone? That is a question demanding further research, though we do have on record a few fatalities due to allergic reactions and choking.)
Banana republicanism has haunted many other shores. But unless you are a close reader of international journals such as The Economist or the Asian Wall Street Journal, while we are considering dangers and politics alike, you likely missed hearing the news of a trade war that raged unchecked for nearly a decade: a war to make Europe safe for American bananas.

At issue, as far as the United States was concerned, was the European Union’s selfish view that Europeans should eat bananas grown in former European colonies and distributed by European firms. American banana firms such as Chiquita and Dole took a different view, holding that the world should gobble bananas brought to them courtesy of the world’s sole superpower—bananas, that is, produced by American client states in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
The war took serious turns. In 1999, American soldiers landed on St. Vincent, a former British colony that lies southeast of Puerto Rico, to destroy the island’s thriving marijuana crop. In the inevitable ensuing collateral damage, those troops torched a few banana groves as well, just to press the point. One small irony, a well-heeled St. Vincent grower told the New York Times, is that many islanders turned to growing pot only because they were tired of playing banana politics with trade representatives from Washington and Paris. In the meanwhile, The Economist grumbled, ‘‘America’s bully-boy tactics will stiffen European resolve in disputes over beef and much else.’’ 
Those tactics included the United States government’s slapping retaliatory import tariffs on a range of European goods ranging from Italian prosciutto to French handbags to Scottish wool sweaters. There was also talk of extending the tariff to cultural imports such as films, objets d’art, books, and magazines—which meant that it might have cost just that much more to read about the banana wars in the first place, since for the most part the American media studiously ignored the absurd and embarrassing story. Bananas here, other fruit there: though the banana war ended in Pyrrhic victory, China recently acceded to American citrus growers’ demands that its markets be opened to gwailo oranges—and this in a country where citrus fruit has been grown in abundance for thousands of years.
Whatever its tangled political and religious history, the banana has long been recognized as a rich food source. Buried in the scientific description of the banana that most often graces our tables, Musa sapientum, is quiet homage to its presumed wonders: the Latin means ‘‘muse of the wise person.’’ Potassium, which the banana contains in abundance, has been likewise called ‘‘the salt of the intelligence,’’ perhaps because it figures prominently in most so-called brain food. The banana holds a heavy concentration of natural sugars, almost 20 percent by weight. This makes it a convenient source of energy, and thus a favored treat of athletes and outdoors enthusiasts—to say nothing of dieters, who benefit greatly from the banana’s low fat (half a gram in a medium-sized fruit of about 110 grams) and total lack of cholesterol.
Thanks to its high pectin content, in fact, bananas are known to reduce blood cholesterol significantly. Bananas also have goodly quantities of phosphorus, iron, thiamin, calcium, and vitamin A. About the only black mark on their record, so to speak, is their tendency to spoil quickly, thanks to the high presence of the enzyme polyphenoloxide, the same substance that causes human skin to tan in sunlight. To slow this spoilage, you can either keep your store of bananas in a cold refrigerator or hang them from a rack so that the fruit dangles in air. It is best, however, simply to eat a banana quickly and be done with the problem of storage—or, as the lads of Monty Python proposed in a memorable skit, get rid of a murder weapon— once and for all.
Botanically, the banana is a strange thing: the plant itself is an herb, related to coriander, and in its wild state it is thin and grassy, reaching a height of twenty-five feet. Its fruit is technically a berry, born of and containing many seeds, and the wild banana is even seedier than its domesticated counterpart. The peel of both the wild and cultivated varieties is full of latex, making it an easy source of gum. The peel also contains serotonin and dopamine, natural mood-elevating sedatives, which gave rise in the sixties to a near-canard: that smoking dried banana peels will get a person high. It is likelier just to yield a headache, though that did not stop the banana from appearing, iconically, on the covers of albums by the Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground and inspiring Donovan’s ditty ‘‘Mellow Yellow,’’ which has mood-elevating powers on its own.  The latex yields another benefit of the banana and, more specifically, of its less sugary variety, the plantain—namely, its ability to stimulate the production of mucus lining in the stomach wall. This, in turn, retards the formation of stomach ulcers and provides some relief for those who suffer from them. The greener the plantain, it is said, the better the protection against the ravages of digestive acids. While the medical jury is still out, even common dessert bananas seem to have some value in this respect as well, and many pediatricians suggest their use for children suffering from gastritis.
Whatever their benefits, people eat bananas because they taste good, and bananas have thus become the world’s most popular fruit by a commanding margin. Though Americans may identify themselves symbolically with the apple and the pies made from it, for instance, they eat a third more bananas than apples—nearly twenty-eight pounds per person as of the dawn of the millennium. (This is well below the count in Uganda, the world’s leading consumer of bananas, where, as of 2003, each person ate 772 pounds a year.) Today bananas are grown across the world, not only in the tropics but also in greenhouses in temperate climates—and even in Iceland, outdoors, on geyser-studded volcanic soils. Growers face many challenges, though. Much of the world’s production takes place on small farms of often poor soil quality, and cultivation and harvest practices are often ecologically destructive, often involving the use of slash-and-burn agriculture.
The fact that the banana is, technically, a clone makes it highly susceptible to both pests and disease, which can devastate a harvest, and which has historically meant that bananas are heavily treated with pesticides to bring them to market, though large growers such as Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita have taken steps to reduce pesticide spraying in favor of environmentally sustainable methods.
Defying those grim odds, in the mid-1990s, following decades of experimentation, Honduran plant breeder Franklin Rosales and American geneticist Philip Rowe announced the development of a new banana variety, FHIA-01, popularly called the Goldfinger, that is resistant to the suite of pests and diseases—especially the dreaded black sigatoka, or black leaf streak, caused by a fungus—that now afflict the Cavendish variety, which dominates today’s markets, accounting for 99 percent of sales in Europe and North America. (The Cavendish emerged as the world winner mostly by virtue of its large size, durability in shipping, and happy habit of ripening almost exactly three weeks after being harvested.
It helped its fortunes, though, that Panama disease wiped out the former leader, the Gros Michel, in 1959.) With genetic tinkering, too, ethylene releases can be better timed so that a banana can take even longer to mature, affording it an expanded shelf life that the average book might envy. The Goldfinger and other so-called super-ripe bananas may well turn out to be the perfect version of what has long been considered the perfect fruit.

SENEGALESE BANANA GLACE
12 bananas
1 pint heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
Blend four bananas until pulpy. Add cream and sugar, then place mixture in a glass bowl and freeze for two hours, or until firm but not frozen. Halve the remaining bananas lengthwise and crosswise. Set four pieces on a small plate or saucer and spread the banana mixture over the banana segments just before serving. Add slivered almonds, roasted peanuts, and raisins to taste.

FRIED BANANAS
A favorite of many South American and Caribbean cuisines, fried bananas are the matter of a moment’s work to make. Simply take a peeled banana, halve it lengthwise, and saute´ the segments in butter until brown on both sides. Coat with sugar and cinnamon.

BANANAS IN SILK THREAD
This Chinese recipe, adapted from Gloria Bley Miller’s delightful Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook (Grosset & Dunlap, 1970), makes an elegant, only slightly more complicated variation on the earlier recipe for fried bananas.
4 bananas
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 tablespoon wine vinegar
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups water
Peel bananas and slice lengthwise. Heat oil and fry bananas until brown. In a saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, and water and boil. Coat bananas in hot syrup, then briefly immerse them in ice water to crystallize the coating.

SULAWESI BANANA PANCAKES
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
2 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
3 bananas
1/2 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon vegetable oil

Put water into a mixing bowl and add the yeast, sugar, and salt. Stir until the dry ingredients dissolve. Mash peeled bananas and add to the mixture. Mix thoroughly to form a batter. Allow this to rest for an hour. Pour batter in portions into a nonstick frying pan in which vegetable oil has been heated. Fry on medium heat until golden.

By Gregory McNamee in the book 'MOVABLE FEASTS- The History, Science, and Lore of Food', Praeger Pubrishers, Westpoint U.S.A & London, 2007, p. 32-37. Edited an illustrated to be postedd by Leopoldo Costa.