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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American

for the seven days starting April 23rd, 2008. I'm Steve

Mercky. This week on the podcast, we're going bananas. We'll talk to Dan Coppell, author of the book

Banana, The Fate of the Fruit, that changed the world. And I'll play you some audio from my

recent visit to a banana plantation in Guatemala. First up, Dan Coppell, he's a contributing editor at National Geographic Adventure

and has written for Outside Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Audubon, and the New York Times Magazine.

He was in Amherst, Massachusetts for a speaking engagement when we talked.

Hi, Dan, great to talk to you today. Hi, Dan.

Great to talk to you today.

Hi, Steve.

Thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure.

You say in your book that you've become a bit of a banana obsessive.

So why don't you tell us some of the things that have obsessed you?

Well, the thing that's obsessed me the most, I think, is the contrast between the sort of complexity of the bananas past, the 7,000 years of banana history as it's become the world's most important and cultivated fruit.

And the sort of simplicity of our relationship with the banana as a piece of popular culture,

the banana that we have jingles about and that we collect stickers on and that we

...