are somewhat cloudy. The melody was adapted from an 1860s sheet-music hit called âWhen I Saw Sweet Nellie Home,â which in turn was derived from, of all things, Handelâs âHallelujah Chorusâ (you can actually hear traces of the classical work in the banana song if you hum one, then the other, in the same key: hal-le-lu-jahâ¦yes-we-have-no ). But there are several variations on the origin of the final singsong hit.
The most widely accepted version puts Frank Silver on a date; while visiting his girlfriendâs home, heâs bemused, then perturbed, by an underfoot kid brother who keeps repeating the title phrase, explaining that the amusingly mangled verbiage was something heâd heard uttered by an immigrant fruit vendor. A second starting point places Cohn and Silver at a speakeasy called the Blossom Heath Inn, forty minutes by train from Manhattan in Lynbrook, Long Island. In that account, the title is coined by a Greek grocer named Jimmy Costas, who used the phrase as a sort of verbal shoulder shrug when his shelves were fresh out of the tropical fruit. A 1931 account of the songâs beginnings, published in Harperâs Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allenâs Only Yesterday , mixes the two yarns: The keynote phrase was coined by an Italian fruit seller, repeated in a newspaper cartoon, and test-marketed by the songwriters in the Long Island suburbs before it finally made it to Broadway.
The songâs symbolic origins, however, lie not in specific people or places, but in the question it suggests: Are bananas available?
The answer was yesâtheyâre not.
Why would a grocer with plenty of supplyâthe song mentions onions and cabbages as well as âall kindsâ of fresh produceâbe unable to meet demand for what had, in the previous two decades, become Americaâs favorite and most widely available fruit?
The malady that turned banana plantations into dust was beginning to have an effect on supply. These occasional shortages were barely noticed by shoppers, because banana companies were continuing to acquire land and plant new crops. But that process was accelerating to the point where a few public blips began to appear. It didnât mean an overall slowdown in banana consumption or an increase in prices. Instead, Americans got a happy song. Yet in the banana-growing nations, the results were increasingly harsh.
CHAPTER 14
Man Makes
a Banana
I T WASNâT THAT UNITED FRUIT was ignorant of Panama disease. A few executives warned of an impending disaster, but since the disease was relatively slow-moving, compared to todayâs banana maladies, they generally went unheeded.
The banana barons might have adopted a resistant banana if they knew of one exactly like the Gros Michel, requiring no change in consumer tastes or in growing, ripening, and shipping. While the Cavendish was grown as a minor commercial variety in a few places, the idea that it would replace the best-known banana was unthinkable. The lesser-known fruit was smaller, more fragile, and didnât taste as good as the Gros Michel. Though the banana industry had shown, repeatedly, that it knew how to innovate, it no longer seemed to want toânot when it could simply level some virgin forest and start new plantations to replace the dying ones.
The first efforts to breed stronger bananas were conducted by academics, who had a daunting task: they had to, for the first time, find out what bananas actually were, and they had to determine the genetic makeup of the fruit at a time when such structural studies were barely heard of. Almost nothing was known about bananas. With just a single variety, and it so easy to grow, an advanced understanding of the fruit, until then, seemed pointless.
The Gros Michel crisis made the work seem absolutely urgentâat least to the scientists tracking the path of the disease. In 1922 the British government founded the Imperial College of Tropical
The most widely accepted version puts Frank Silver on a date; while visiting his girlfriendâs home, heâs bemused, then perturbed, by an underfoot kid brother who keeps repeating the title phrase, explaining that the amusingly mangled verbiage was something heâd heard uttered by an immigrant fruit vendor. A second starting point places Cohn and Silver at a speakeasy called the Blossom Heath Inn, forty minutes by train from Manhattan in Lynbrook, Long Island. In that account, the title is coined by a Greek grocer named Jimmy Costas, who used the phrase as a sort of verbal shoulder shrug when his shelves were fresh out of the tropical fruit. A 1931 account of the songâs beginnings, published in Harperâs Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allenâs Only Yesterday , mixes the two yarns: The keynote phrase was coined by an Italian fruit seller, repeated in a newspaper cartoon, and test-marketed by the songwriters in the Long Island suburbs before it finally made it to Broadway.
The songâs symbolic origins, however, lie not in specific people or places, but in the question it suggests: Are bananas available?
The answer was yesâtheyâre not.
Why would a grocer with plenty of supplyâthe song mentions onions and cabbages as well as âall kindsâ of fresh produceâbe unable to meet demand for what had, in the previous two decades, become Americaâs favorite and most widely available fruit?
The malady that turned banana plantations into dust was beginning to have an effect on supply. These occasional shortages were barely noticed by shoppers, because banana companies were continuing to acquire land and plant new crops. But that process was accelerating to the point where a few public blips began to appear. It didnât mean an overall slowdown in banana consumption or an increase in prices. Instead, Americans got a happy song. Yet in the banana-growing nations, the results were increasingly harsh.
CHAPTER 14
Man Makes
a Banana
I T WASNâT THAT UNITED FRUIT was ignorant of Panama disease. A few executives warned of an impending disaster, but since the disease was relatively slow-moving, compared to todayâs banana maladies, they generally went unheeded.
The banana barons might have adopted a resistant banana if they knew of one exactly like the Gros Michel, requiring no change in consumer tastes or in growing, ripening, and shipping. While the Cavendish was grown as a minor commercial variety in a few places, the idea that it would replace the best-known banana was unthinkable. The lesser-known fruit was smaller, more fragile, and didnât taste as good as the Gros Michel. Though the banana industry had shown, repeatedly, that it knew how to innovate, it no longer seemed to want toânot when it could simply level some virgin forest and start new plantations to replace the dying ones.
The first efforts to breed stronger bananas were conducted by academics, who had a daunting task: they had to, for the first time, find out what bananas actually were, and they had to determine the genetic makeup of the fruit at a time when such structural studies were barely heard of. Almost nothing was known about bananas. With just a single variety, and it so easy to grow, an advanced understanding of the fruit, until then, seemed pointless.
The Gros Michel crisis made the work seem absolutely urgentâat least to the scientists tracking the path of the disease. In 1922 the British government founded the Imperial College of Tropical
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