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Bananas are so tasty. From the time during my sophomore year when a group of friends and I decided to all eat bananas together at dinner to test a (weak) hypothesis that bananas cause weird dreams, I’ve seen them as one of the more interesting of fruits. So it follows that I jumped on the new book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. It’s a little discomfiting to read about how the banana companies began by ruthlessly ruling Latin American countries, murdering their citizens and leaders and taking over large tracts of land in order to make the banana profitable to sell to Americans for less than an apple. Luckily, the companies are not nearly so ruthless anymore, but the damage is done. More interesting to me than this part of bananas history, though, is the fact that we don’t eat the bananas our grandparents ate. In fact, through the 1950s, Americans ate a BETTER banana: the “Big Mike” or Gros Michel. This banana, by commercial standards, was bigger, sweeter, creamier, kept better, traveled better, and was so well-loved that yes, you WERE in danger of slipping on errant banana peels in big cities in the 1920s and 1930s.

However, bananas are not an evolutionarily favored plant, for all their benefits. They are clones – which explains the lack of any seeds, and the remarkable uniformity of the ones you see at the grocery store. But in the past, and now again, it means bananas fall easily to any fungus, disease, mite or bacteria that successfully attack a single plant of a banana cultivar. In the 1950s, Big Mike bananas started disappearing due to a fungus traveling easily between plantations. Big Mike bananas are not extinct, but they don’t work in big plantations anymore. How frustrating, then, that our bananas today aren’t as good as back in your grandma’s day. I’m tempted to ask someone of the era what exactly these dream bananas were like…but to be realistic, if someone asked you forty years from your last one what was so great about Pink Lady apples, could you really pin it down?

In the 1950s, the banana companies were forced to realize that they needed a banana replacement for the Big Mike, and they scornfully switched to the “inferior” Cavendish banana you see now. It is more fickle in travel, smaller, less creamy, and generally considered a weak replacement (though consumers, apparently, didn’t mind or didn’t notice the difference slicing it into their cereal). But the Cavendish, as I write, is being attacked by a stronger strain of the same fungus that destroyed most of the Big Mike bananas. And we’re no better at solving the problem. Clones just don’t have the genetic strength of other breeding methods. The best hope currently for keeping our Banana Foster recipes for the next couple generations is to employ transgenic methods to produce a third commercial banana. Wild bananas generally aren’t very appealing, even if hardy, and most bananas eaten by the non-Western World are starchier, closer to a plantain (how many of us would switch happily to a plantain on your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?). And regular cross-breeding is next to impossible with seedless fruit. It’ll take a lot of trial plants to find something that we picky consumers barely notice is not a Cavendish, but doesn’t die from fungus or the other diseases currently decimating the crops.

Anyway, it was a really good book. If you don’t feel like reading it, you might want to instead check out the NPR Fresh Air interview the author did, complete with singing a banana jingle and a thoughtful explanation why transgenic bananas aren’t worrisome. The author had many opportunities to try bananas you’ll never see in the US, and confidently picks a favorite: the Lacatan. He claims it is sweet and extra creamy, and is beloved by the locals who have access to it. Again, no fair. I am being told that one of my favorite fruits isn’t even the best of it’s kind, with the two better varieties either gone from the market or only sold in and near the Phillipines. I’ll need to find someone to smuggle a Lacatan to me at some point, so I can tell kids years from now how amazing yet another banana they’ll probably never eat was.

No, I’m not moving. But one of the downsides of Boulder right now has been lack of access to a community garden, and that’s about to change. I got the call today that I have a bed in the Fortune Garden, one of the community gardens that I am told is difficult to get into. This is because it is located in one of the oldest, most esteemed and expensive neighborhoods of Boulder – and there is little turnover for both real estate and garden estate. I weighed the benefits of the two nearest gardens (this one’s closer, more intimate, and better protected from wildlife) for a couple months before requesting my top choice. I’m hopeful it’ll be as good as I expect.

It’s not the fairest thing to expect community, friendship, drinking buddies, outdoor activity, grassroots activism and oh yeah, fresh vegetables and herbs from a simple 100 square feet, but my last plot, at a meager 50 square feet did just that. I miss my fellow gardeners from the humble Clemens garden very much, and hope I’ll find interesting gardeners at this new location. It’s a little further away, but that’s all the more reason to become more comfortable on my bike and to prepare seeds for spring. It’s time to read up on what Colorado’s growing season will and won’t let me do (damn the desert climate), and figure out what seeds or seedlings to order.

The other benefit to Boulder’s community gardens set-up is that they have made the gardens part of city-owned land, protected from development. My last garden existed at the grace of two, not just one, private property owners, and came under threat of condo development during my time there. While it was inspiring to see how our garden group came together to argue for keeping the garden (successful so far), it’s a lot less stressful to know the city’s got your back. Plus, for a ludicrous sum, I could take a course this summer in bee-keeping, which is awfully cool. I just have to figure out whether it’s hundreds of dollars cool.

It’s true. Two weeks ago, Berg finally agreed to do it! He had been thinking about it for quite a while, but needed some friendly and a little liquid encouragement (hey, being in engineering can make you more fashion-conservative). He’s quite pleased with the end result, though, as am I. And I get the impression he’s getting a great reaction out of his fellow students, too. Perhaps I will be giving other Aerospace Engineering students mohawks soon…

Berg’s hair is irrepressibly curly, which makes for a mohawk that practically stands up (or poofs up) on its own. Sam’s mohawk, while incredibly long (perhaps 6 inches at the apex now), is so straight that it takes 1/2 can of foul-smelling hair spray and an assistant to stand it up. Thus, he rarely stands his up, certainly not for his recent activities, which have included multiple TV appearances. It’s too bad…I think he would be an excellent speaker for his field, whether or not his hair pushes him to 6 feet tall. But he prefers to keep it down except for special occasions, which is why I haven’t posted any pictures of his mohawk on here. Encourage Sam to spike it, and you’ll see some then.

So how have things been? Same as usual, I suppose. I’m repainting my desert shoes – from green to red, and today I’m making root beer from scratch. The recipe will be posted if it’s successful, but there are days of steps before we’ll know. Root beer making is a very interesting project, however – requiring a variety of chipped barks, and created using a mixture of molasses and yeast that both carbonates the beverage and provides a low alcoholic content. Not enough to even qualify it as a wine cooler, but enough that modern companies don’t even try – as we all know, HFCS and compressed carbon dioxide are cheaper and more predictable.

I have a not-so-secret goal in this root beer project. A nearby local restaurant, better known for its well-loved alcoholic brewed products, makes the best root beer I’ve ever had. It’s not super-sweet, but full of flavor (and scent…not the best for a very pregnant friend newly sensitive to strange smells). It’s clear they’re doing something other root beer producers are not, as no bottled products (I’ve tried quite a few in the last couple months) have quite mimicked the combination of flavors. I have some ideas for how to figure out their recipe, but for now it’s the old-fashioned way: make my own, continue to drink theirs, and try to sort out which flavor compounds need tweaking in my own recipe. Failing that, I wonder what kind of offer would convince one of the hip employees to share the original recipe with me?