Panama Disease Research Paper

Though it may sound a mundane topic, bananas have had great historic importance throughout much of the world. Bananas have been a main source of food, spanning many years across many ancient kingdoms. The origins of the banana are rather quite hard to pin down. Though scientists believe them to have originated in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific around 8,000 to 5,000 BCE, they keep discovering older bananas. One could say that these new discoveries “drive them bananas.” The banana gets it’s name from middle eastern soldiers referring to it as “bana” which means finger. It was likely called this for its long, finger-esque shape.
There are many varieties of bananas, though you likely have only eaten the Cavendish variety, named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. The Cavendish wasn’t always the most popular banana, that title used to belong to the Gros Michel variety. If you have ever noticed that banana flavoring doesn’t taste like bananas, that is because it was based on the taste of the now extinct Gros Michel. The Gros Michel went extinct due to a combination of problems, among these were the vulnerability of the fruit itself, the primitive technology of the time, and the sudden outburst of panama disease. Panama disease was a great …show more content…
who made a fortune off of bananas. He saw colossal trade ships dumping huge mounds of bananas onto the ground. He asked the sailors what they were doing, and was shocked to learn that it was being thrown away. The man told him that if the bananas had any freckles, they wouldn’t make it to be sold in time, so they threw them away. Upon learning this Samuel went about collecting bananas, transporting them by train, and selling them off to vendors who would come meet him on the train and buy straight from the boxcar. By the time Samuel was 18 years old, he had made $100,000, which is about 2.5 million dollars by today's