Big book about bananas mates botany with mythos

Would you like to grow some maia (bananas) in your garden? How about some of the older Hawaiian varieties that are becoming rare or even extinct? Have you ever eaten maia poi? Would you like to learn some new recipes for cooking bananas for your next ono potluck ohana gathering?

An impressive new book about bananas can start you on your way to a better appreciation of this awesome fruit while providing fascinating cultural, historical and scientific information as well as recipes.

"The World of Bananas in Hawai‘i: Then and Now" (University of Hawaii Press, $80) by Angela Kay Kepler with photos by Francis G. Rust, is the winner of the 2012 Ka Palapala Po‘okela book award in the natural science category. The work is the result of nine years of library research and field and agricultural investigations in Hawaii and other Pacific islands.

Maia was one of the core food plants in old Hawaii. It was dried, steamed, grilled or roasted, and has many other uses. Leaves and trunks create ono steam for imu cooking. Lei makers love maia fibers, and flower arrangers who create big, bold designs love to use the cut-up trunks as substitutes for foam bases.

Kepler’s encyclopedic work points out that Hinaea is the goddess of sunrise and sunset, the art of stamping patterns on kapa, and maia lele, an old banana variety with a deep salmon-colored flesh. She also was the healer of a major childhood disease: ea or thrush, caused by a vitamin A deficiency.

Lele bananas, rich in vitamin A, were part of the cure.

In old Hawaii, there were few foods rich in vitamin A, as we did not have pumpkins, papayas, mangoes or carrots until Westerners brought them after 1778. In fact, lele have the highest provitamin A of all bananas tested worldwide.

There were once more than 60 varieties of maia. Many are lost today due to neglect, forgetting our past, being overly impressed by new varieties, and pests and disease. Sometimes we still see older varieties on hikes to remote places, especially at higher elevations where they escape some of the pests and disease.

Banana bunchy top disease is wiping out maia in Hawaii and all over Polynesia. This deadly viral disease is just one reason why we need strict quarantine laws and adequate funding for agriculture inspectors.

Waimea Arboretum here on Oahu and Maui Nui Botanical Gardens on the Valley Isle are some of the main perpetuators of old Hawaiian varieties.

In remote, wet, steep areas, people of old, perhaps the earliest voyagers from the Marquesas, grew maia and used them not only for food but also for clothing, medicine, footwear, shelter, containers, canoe rollers, water runways and as their main staple of life. Maia may have grown in Hawaii before kalo! The Mu or Muaimaia (banana-eating people) may have been here even earlier.

On Kauai a helicopter survey of Wainiha Valley found more than 3,000 plants of rare, old banana varieties. It is such an impossible, steep and wet place to live, yet people did inhabit the valley and they lived on banana and opae (freshwater shrimp). Kepler says they were probably pushed to this remote place by new, more aggressive people who had a more diverse diet and a more warlike culture.

"The World of Bananas in Hawai‘i" is a big book, and when I first got it, I thought, "How much is there to know about bananas, really?"

I was surprised though, and inspired to try to grow more of these older varieties to perpetuate (and eat!) them. We also could grow more of these on farms to diversify our diets and promote food sustainability.

Heidi Leianuenue Bornhorst is a sustainable landscape consultant specializing in native, xeric and edible gardens. Email her at heidib@hawaii.rr.com.