Who will save the banana?

Steve Mirsky loves bananas, he loves them so much that he traveled all the way to Central America to learn about the mysterious disease that destroys banana crops. Will science find a solution?

Where would we be today without bananas? Without them the silent film industry, which was based on the images of men in the hills tripping over a banana peel, might not have taken off at all. Children had to stuff dripping oranges into their lunch bags and the well-known band "Bananaharma" would have perhaps received a more fragrant color if they had chosen the name "Mashamsina".

I personally run on bananas. When I was a child, my daily breakfast was officially named "rice crackers, banana and milk". Even today, I often shove a banana in my cycling jersey pocket to give me a mid-ride potassium boost. Actually, I'm on a banana break right now.

Okay, I'm back. (I spread some peanut butter on the banana. It doesn't work so well when riding a bike). What is my record in eating bananas? Dan Koppel, who wrote the book "Banana: The Fate of a Fruit That Changed the World," claims that "If you're an average American, about forty years old, you're probably approaching your ten thousandth banana." By this calculation, I'm probably approaching 15,000 bananas. (Because of my age or because I'm not an average person? I don't reveal that to you).

While doing the research for the book, Koppel spent a week on a banana plantation in Honduras. Last winter I found myself in a similar environment. On January 31, I left a message for myself on my digital recorder: "The heat is terrifying here." But the heat that exhausted me contributed to the normal development of the hundreds of thousands of bananas that grew around me, a little north of Honduras, in a banana plantation in Kirigua in Guatemala.

I arrived in Central America after being invited to give a lecture on a "Scientific American" cruise to the Caribbean. Hard work indeed, but someone has to do it. One day, the sailors were offered a tour of the banana plantations, an offer I obviously couldn't refuse.

Our guide, Julio Cordova, said that the medium-sized plantation, which has an area of ​​about 320 dunams, and its packing house fill five trucks a day. Each truck carries 960 boxes. Each box has about a dozen "hands". (What we call a cluster is called a hand here, and each banana is a big, yellow finger). In the center of the plantation, several dozen workers stand by the production line and break down the huge, full clusters growing on the tree into plastic-wrapped "hands" that will arrive at our table in America a week after the harvest. This work, in the "heat of terror", is really hard work that someone has to do.

Some of the banana leaves showed signs of black sigatoka, a potentially fatal fungus. But Koppel writes that copper sulfate cures the disease (sometimes at the expense of the workers' health). He also reveals some details in his book: the thing I called a tree is actually the largest grass in the world and the fruit is actually a huge grape. Even though there are more than a thousand banana varieties in the world, most of us eat only one - "Cavendish". The bad news is that the Cavendish, my friend of the banana hunters, is dying a slow death. Another fungus, called "Panama disease", kills him.

The brutal killer has acted before. In fact, today's bananas are a pale substitute for the bananas that our grandparents ate, bananas from a variety that was called "Gross Michel", or "Big Mike". "It was a larger variety, with a creamier texture, and with a more intense and fruity taste," Koppel explains. In the 50s, the Panama disease wiped out Big Mike. The Cavendish variety took over, and was thought to be resistant to it. But "the Cavendish was never immune to the disease, but only to the strain that eliminated the Gros Michel" Koppel writes.

No one wants the lyrics of the song "Yes, we don't have bananas" to become a prophecy. And so we are running a race against the clock to find a cure for the disease. Meanwhile, scientists are making genetic changes to create a new banana variety that will be resistant to the Panama disease. After all, it is impossible to imagine a world without a yellow energy bomb.

Steve Mirsky is a reporter for Scientific American. His article was published in the June issue of "Scientific American - Israel"