2 Taking Stock
foods, designed for personal appeal, dwarfed what I could easily rec-
ognize as nutritious fare.
Conveniently located right off the main entrance was the produce
section. There they were, almost front and center: Cavendish bananas
no different from those I saw being boxed in Costa Rica. It was the
same variety dating back decades. Little had changed, each was essen-
tially a clone of the other. The only difference was the sticker affixed to
the yellow peel announcing the company and country of origin.
By all accounts, Cavendish bananas are inferior to a variety sold more
than a half century ago, the Gros Michel. Known more commonly as
Big Mike, they were larger with a creamier texture, fruitier taste, and
thicker skin. Big Mikes were so rugged they were shipped as bunches,
without needing to be padded, disassembled, and boxed. At port,
ships’ cargo holds were loaded and unloaded by tossing bunches of
bananas like luggage on airplanes. The global banana market had
rapidly developed around this single variety.
Then came word of a devastating fungus infecting banana plan-
tations.^ Called Panama disease because of its origin, the fungus
spread with abandon. Unable to contain it, banana companies tried
outrunning it by abandoning existing plantations and moving farther
away. Wielding enormous political leverage (including the long arm of
the United States government), these corporations cleared vast tracts
of tropical rain forest to start new plantations.
Despite all their efforts, growing a single variety of bananas still
left plantations vulnerable and eventually infected. Fifty years after
the fungus was identified, the Big Mike variety was wiped out. With
the international market for bananas verging on collapse, companies
stumbled onto the Cavendish variety, which appeared to be resistant to
Panama disease. Using tissue cultures, mass production was scaled up.
What happened next is worth remembering. Having built an en-
tire system around a single variety only to see it fail, the industry
reconstituted the same system using another single variety. Any lessons
learned from Panama disease and monoculture food production soon
faded away.
In the late 60 s, an outbreak with similarities to Panama disease
started appearing in Cavendish bananas in Taiwan.^ Since losing the
Big Mike and landing on the Cavendish, the banana industry had