January 10, 2011 Issue

Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” in this week’s issue is interestingly structured. I didn’t really notice its form until near the article’s end when it suddenly jumps from Honduras back to Brisbane. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but it was only then I realized that what Peed had done was show (as opposed to tell) the two approaches that the banana industry is taking to combat a devastating blight called Tropical Race Four that’s wiped out the Cavendish banana in Asia and Australia. One approach is genetic modification (inserting a gene into the banana that makes it Race Four resistant), which is being researched at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane; the other approach is traditional plant breeding (growing many different banana varieties in hope of finding a Race Four resistant one), which is being developed at a La Lima research station in Honduras. Obviously, Peed’s piece is not just an exercise in banana appreciation like the article that Berton Roueché wrote for the magazine thirty-eight years ago (“The Humblest Fruit,” The New Yorker, October 1, 1973; collected in Roueché's 1978 The River World). Nor is it solely about the market’s acceptance of genetically modified produce like, say, John Seabrook’s piece about Calgene’s Flavr Savr tomato is (see “Tremors in the Hothouse,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Seabrook’s 2008 Flash of Genius). Nor is it strictly about Tropical Race Four the way, say, Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “Stung” (The New Yorker, August 6, 2007) is about the phenomenon (colony-collapse disorder) that was wiping out the bee population a few years ago. Pead’s article is about all these things – banana, blight, and genetic modification. He does a good job laying it all out in a relatively tight design. His best move is the way he brings Race Four alive on the page. To do this, he leads with an arresting account of a visit he made to a banana plantation in Humpty Doo, near Darwin, Australia. The manager shows him around the plantation. Peed’s report contains this memorable passage, perhaps the most pungent of the piece:

As we walked through the fields, Tropical Race Four seemed abundant as the mosquitoes circling our heads. “There’s one,” Smith said, pointing. “That’s two. You can see that one there? He’s coming out. There’s another one.” Some plants were just turning yellow; others were a desiccated mass of raw umber. At one point, Smith unsheathed a cane knife, which is similar to a machete, but with a shorter, wider blade. An axe is not needed to cut down a banana plant, which is not a tree but, rather, the world’s largest herb. The part that is usually called the trunk is the pseudostem – a barkless staff composed only of leaves waiting to unfurl. In one stroke, Smith sliced through a diseased plant. The inside resembled a crushed-out cigar, and the fetid odor was overwhelming. Smith said, “You smell that, and you think, Ah, fuck.”

There’s a low-key, workmanlike quality to Peed’s writing that I like. There are no flashy metaphors or similes. He knows he’s got an interesting (and important) story to tell; he more or less gets out of the way and lets it tell itself. I like his use of the first-person (e.g. “That afternoon, Dale and I drove east of Brisbane to a state-owned greenhouse”), and I like the sharp, bright dabs of detail (e.g., “Dragon flies buzzed, and a stray cat pawed the dirt”). For all of these reasons, Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue.