“This is my book… and these are bananas!” Dan Koeppel said.
On Wednesday, Feb. 12, Koeppel — author, journalist and banana expert — held up a bunch of bananas in front of an audience at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum to begin his lecture, titled “Why The Banana is Absolutely Everything.”
Koeppel is the author of numerous books, including “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World” (2008). He has also appeared on the NPR segment “Fresh Air” and published articles about bananas in The New York Times, National Geographic and Popular Science.
Embracing the name “Dan the Banana Man,” Koeppel described himself as having the world’s broadest knowledge of bananas. After writing a National Geographic article about bananas, he felt there wasn’t enough space to fully explore the topic. Koeppel decided the banana needed its own book.
Athenaeum Director Priya Junnar said that Koeppel’s talk, covering American history, global economics and agricultural science, made him a perfect contender to speak at the Athenaeum.
“We try to have a broad range of topics that grow everyone’s intellectual experience and mind,” Junnar said. “[Koeppel’s talk] makes a lot of sense, and it also ties together so many breadths.”
The banana has a surprisingly long history, and its story holds important implications for the future of global food supply chains.
“This is my book… and these are bananas!”
Bananas are a cheap, staple food item for Americans — the average American consumes 100 bananas per year, Koeppel noted — but they are expensive to ship, store and grow.
“If I buy a local apple even today at my supermarket, it costs triple per pound what bananas cost,” Koeppel said. “Bananas are shipped from thousands of miles away, they go bad really quickly, they require refrigeration, they’re incredibly expensive to produce.”
To explain this discrepancy, Koeppel peeled back the history of bananas in the United States.
He began with the introduction of bananas to American consumers by Chiquita, the first banana company in the US, using an intense marketing campaign of ads, coupons and cheap prices. For this model to work, Chiquita needed to drastically deflate banana prices.
“To make any product cheaper,” Koeppel said, “you control the means of production — which means workers, factories, physical plants — and you market to increase demand.”
To lower these costs of production, Chiquita heavily exploited land and labor in South and Central America: burning statehouses to destroy property records, massacring strikers and even overthrowing governments.
“Between 1900 and 1954, bananas were responsible for 30 government overthrows in Latin America, directly funded by the United States military and Chiquita banana,” Koeppel said.
Banana companies also kept prices low by introducing monocropping and large plantations.
“They figured out how to standardize bananas,” Koeppel said. “Let’s not think of bananas as farm foods. They are not from nature: gardening is gone, banana plantations are factories.”
These banana plantations were, and still are, incredibly susceptible to disease. To this day, a single clump of dirt-carrying fungus can easily wipe out an entire plantation. In the past, this fungus has even wiped out entire banana cultivars.
“The banana that was grown in Latin America in the early days was called the Gros Michel, and it was a very different banana breed,” Koeppel said. “It was tougher, it was easier to ship.”
By the 1960s, the Gros Michel had been completely wiped out by a fungus called the Panama disease. Rather than address this fungal problem caused by monocropping, banana companies simply found a new cultivar to fill U.S. markets.
“There are over a thousand banana varieties,” Koeppel told the audience. “You’ve probably only tasted one of them, the Cavendish banana. I can tell you as someone who has tasted many bananas over the years, this is the worst banana on Earth.”
The Cavendish might be the “worst banana on Earth” to Koeppel, but it’s also the only banana cultivar that is widely sold in U.S. markets. Now, a new strain of the Panama disease is spreading, to which the Cavendish is not resistant.
To avoid the loss of bananas as we know them, Koeppel argued that we need to genetically modify new banana varieties that are marketable, transportable and resistant to threats. Old-fashioned breeding methods, he claimed, are too slow and too unpredictable to be effective.
“We do need a commodity banana. It will probably be a [genetically modified organism (GMO)] banana,” Koeppel said. “Bananas don’t have seeds or pollen, so some of the things we’re scared of about GMOs don’t have to happen in bananas.”
Once a new commodity banana has been created, he argued, several more varieties should be made and added to U.S. markets.
“We replaced the commodity banana we had at the grocery shop with another commodity banana,” Koeppel said. “It was bad science. It was bad politics. So why are we still trying to do this: why are we looking for a single commodity banana?”
Attendee Tarika Modi SC ’27 appreciated learning about the background of such a ubiquitous fruit.
“It made me realize I don’t always know where the things I buy comes from,” Modi said.
Despite the issues threatening bananas, Koeppel sees an optimistic future for the banana industry.
With new varieties sold at higher prices, he believes that global supply chains will be able to spread profits more equitably to the countries and workers growing the fruits. He also has a personal reason to want new marketable banana varieties — his love for bananas.
“The benefit all of us will have is great bananas in the United States of America.”
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