That the extremely perishable fruits of an exotic tropical plant should become one of the most inexpensive, everyday foods in North America is a miracle of some sort. It's a miracle made possible by complex corporate organization, large tracts of tropical lands, numerous workers, refrigerated ships and rapid communication.

Long before that all fell into place, the banana was growing wild in the tropics of Asia, possibly Malaysia. One source allows the banana a huge homeland stretching from India to New Guinea. Before cultivation, the banana was hard and full of seeds, as is the wild banana today. Some unknown early agriculturalist must have seen promise in the tough fruit and selected the least seeded specimen for future propagation. Over time the seedless sweet banana increasingly dominated and the resulting domesticated banana became a tropical staple. The banana grows from a rhizome into a tall, green plant as tall as a tree but containing no woody parts.

Little is known of the plant's earliest travels from its home base. Ancient wall inscriptions from Assyria in southwest Asia dating back almost 7000 years seem to depict the domesticated banana but scholars are still undecided. Archaeological excavations in the Indus Valley indicate bananas were being cultivated 6000 years ago. In the 4th century BC the banana made its first appearance in print, in a Hindu holy book called the Ramayana.

Though Alexander the Great and his men encountered bananas in India, they made little attempt to bring them back to the West. The Arabs began growing bananas in parts of North Africa and subsequently carried the plants to the Iberian peninsula. The banana grew well in the south, but with the expulsion of the Moors in the late 1400's, the banana died out in the area and was then rediscovered growing in Africa by the Portuguese.

Bananas came to the Americas in the early 1500's and eventually became hugely successful in Central America and parts of South America. In the late 1800's Costa Rica became the first banana republic-that is, a country with a single major export crop controlled by a foreign corporation. Ecuador and Guatemala soon followed. Bananas were grown systematically by thousands of company workers. The produce was shipped on refrigerated vessels-the first in the world-and was available throughout the entire year.

Today Colombia and Honduras are also major banana exporters. Hawaii, the only state where bananas are grown commercially, supplies just 1% of all the bananas eaten in the United States.