Gabriel Sachter-Smith is a banana aficionado who has identified some 500 varieties on expeditions around the tropical world. “It’s like collecting Pokémon,” Sachter-Smith said at his farm, Hawaii Banana Source, on the North Shore of Oahu. He walked among rows of young plants — some of the 150 varieties he grows — in a T-shirt stained with mud and banana sap. His one-eyed dog, Mendel, trotted beside his boots. “My default mode of being alive is, ‘What is that banana? ’”
Mr. Sachter-Smith, 35, became interested in bananas when he was 14, on a trip with his mother to Washington, D.C., where he saw banana trees in a friend’s yard. The friend told him they weren’t trees — that he could dig them up for the winter, bring them inside and replant them when it was warm. When he returned to Colorado, he began growing them as houseplants. “I was trying to figure out what a banana plant is,” he says. “It’s been a never-ending search ever since.”
Mr. Sachter-Smith left harsh Colorado to study tropical plant and soil science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he eventually earned a master’s degree. His global quest has led him to encounter bananas that are egg-shaped and orange, 12 inches long and pale yellow, or plump like sausages and green. They are eaten fried, roasted, boiled and plain, but are also grown to feed pigs, decorate and weave cloth. In Papua New Guinea, where Mr. Sachter-Smith has gone on two banana-hunting expeditions, their names have many meanings: “young man” (mero mero), “can feed a whole family” (navotavu), “something fought for” (bukatawawe), “breast” (nono).
You probably only know one banana: long, yellow, somewhat tasteless. You eat it plain, spread peanut butter on it, or pop it, overripe, into the freezer to make banana bread someday. (Its name, Cavendish, comes from a 19th-century English duke who received a package of bananas and whose gardener grew them in a greenhouse.) Today, the Cavendish accounts for nearly half of all bananas produced in the world and nearly all exports. It holds a Guinness record as the most widely consumed fruit.
But scientists have been warning for years that fungal diseases such as black Sigatoka and Tropical Race 4 could wipe out this monoculture, just as a fungus wiped out its predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s and 1960s. Genetic engineering and breeding are the most likely solutions, so scientists have created a reserve stash of bananas from around the world, with genes that could one day be put to use on the global market.
About 170 of Mr. Sachter-Smith’s finds reside at the Musa International Germplasm Transit Centre, a gene bank in Belgium that safeguards the in vitro DNA of more than 1,600 banana varieties for their potential disease resistance and nutritional variety. The plants are overwintered in test tubes under slow-growing conditions — around 61 degrees Fahrenheit — or cryopreserved at about minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, available for resurrection if the need ever arises.
“There are scientists who have been working for decades and decades to get this all up and running,” Sachter-Smith says. “I just go in for the fun at the end. I’m invited with special banana eyes.” Sometimes he’s invited to a nature reserve or a hospital garden. “Sometimes it’s a road trip, and I have my head out the window looking at every banana plant we pass,” he says. An unusual fruit or leaf prompts a stop. “The bottom line: You’re standing in the field. There’s a banana in front of you. Do you pick it or not?”
The banana plant, which belongs to the Musa genus, is not a tree but a huge herb. Researchers believe the banana’s ancestor, Musa acuminata, was first domesticated in Kuk Swamp, an archaeological site in Papua New Guinea, about 7,000 years ago. The plant traveled across Asia and the South Pacific, changing as it went.
On the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, Mr Sachter-Smith identified 170 varieties. On the neighbouring island of Bougainville, his team collected 61. The Cook Islands yielded 18, and Samoa 15. He has also hunted for bananas in China, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Uganda, Rwanda, Fiji and the Solomon Islands.
What looks like the banana’s trunk is its pseudostem, a moist layer of leaf sheaths around a soft core, from which sprout the long, sail-like leaves. Between the leaves juts out the peduncle, which bears the inflorescence, whose female flowers become fruit (technically berries) and whose male flower droops like a swollen purple heart. For Mr Sachter-Smith, each part can provide a clue to the plant’s genetic makeup.
“He recognises different bananas in the field by the flower, the shape of the leaves,” explains Matthieu Chabannes, a molecular biologist at the Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD). During a month-long trip through South-East Asia several years ago, Mr Sachter-Smith taught the scientist how to identify how many sets of chromosomes there are in a plant. “If the leaves are very straight towards the sky, they are most likely diploid,” said Dr Chabannes. The leaves of a triploid bend up to 45 degrees, while those of a tetraploid are more horizontal. “Over 95% of the time, he is right.”
During his time at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Mr. Sachter-Smith planted and tended “guerrilla” bananas around campus, according to classmate and plant lover Mike Opgenorth, director of the Kahanu Garden and Preserve at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Maui. “He had his spots,” Dr. Opgenorth said.
After graduating, in 2011, Mr Sachter-Smith embarked on his first research mission, to the Solomon Islands. On his return, he completed his master’s degree, studying how 80 different banana genotypes reacted to bunch spur virus, a disease that ruins a banana plant’s fruiting potential. But he abandoned a PhD – the traditional path for a banana expert – to continue working face-to-face with bananas as a farmer. “I’ve spent a lot, a lot of time looking at banana plants and thinking about how they’re different,” he said.
In 2016, Sachter-Smith flew to Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, for her first paid consultancy. Julie Sardos, a geneticist with the research group Bioversity International, needed Sachter-Smith’s “magic eye.”
In one village, researchers found a banana called Navente, which means “part of something” in an extinct local language. The Navente, whose fruit could grow to the size of a man’s arm, was central to the creation story of the local Barapang tribe, whose young people had lost interest in preserving it. The researchers offered to take a sample of Navente to Papua New Guinea’s national collection and the international gene bank for safekeeping. Removing the plant from the area was taboo, but the tribe agreed that doing so would be best for the plant’s future.
In another village, Mr. Sachter-Smith noticed a tall plant that looked like a wild ancestor crossed with a common edible variety. He compared it to a fox mixed with a dog, a hybrid that should not exist. “But in New Guinea, things break the rules,” he says. A genomic analysis later revealed that it was indeed half common banana and half Fe’i, an upright-fruiting plant so ancient that it is described in Samoan legend: After defeating the lowland banana in battle, the Fe’i would raise its head proudly while the loser, humiliated, would not raise its head again. (Most bananas fruit on a fallen stem.)
“He saw it straight away,” said Dr Sardos, who has been on three further trips with Mr Sachter-Smith since 2016. He can recognise a new banana like a new face, she said: “He has this specific ability – a knack.”
How many bananas are left in the wild is a mystery that continues to fascinate Mr. Sachter-Smith. His most recent gig has taken him to Malaysia and Laos, but he would like to go to northeast India, where wild bananas thrive. “If you’re going to look for new wild bananas, that’s the place,” he says. “I’m self-employed, so it’s like, let me know, I’ll be there.”
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