Banana : The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

In the vein of the bestselling Salt and Cod, a gripping chronicle of the myth, mystery, and uncertain fate of the world’s most popular fruit In this fascinating and surprising exploration of the banana’s history, cultural significance, and endangered future, award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel gives readers plenty of food for thought. Fast-paced and highly entertaining, Bananatakes us from jungle to supermarket, from corporate boardrooms to kitchen tables around the world. We begin in the Garden of Eden—examining scholars’ belief that Eve’s apple” was actually a banana— and travel to early-twentieth-century Central America, where aptly named banana republics” rose and fell over the crop, while the companies now known as Chiquita and Dole conquered the marketplace. Koeppel then chronicles the banana’s path to the present, ultimately—and most alarmingly—taking us to banana plantations across the globe that are being destroyed by a fast-moving blight, with no cure in sight—and to the high-tech labs where new bananas are literally being built in test tubes, in a race to save the world’s most beloved fruit.

Dan Koeppel, author of the critically acclaimed memoir To See Every Bird on Earth, is an award-winning outdoors and adventure writer whose work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, the Los Angeles Times, and Popular Science.