TROPICAL ~Treasures~

“I’M GOING TO GROW the ‘Gros Michel’ commercially,” Gabe Sachter-Smith says, picking a petite, finger-length banana out of the bowl of his upturned hat and handing it to me.

My eyes widen. “You think you can really do that?”

Standing in the volcanic hollow of one of Oahu’s last banana farms, fraying fronds hang limp between our heads and a crystal sky. Toward the ocean, dry trade winds stir white specks into the turquoise Pacific. Here on the north shore, Sachter-Smith is working to establish Hawaii Banana Source, a new nursery and farm with 150 banana cultivars, the result of his research in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, southern China, Uganda, and, of course, Hawaii. A graduate of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences program with a thesis on banana diseases, Sachter-Smith is a banana expert.

“How?” I challenge him, stripping off the banana’s thin skin to reveal firm, almost crunchy, orange-yellow flesh. It’s sweet and tangy, with a bite like apple cider. But it isn’t a ‘Gros Michel’; less than 1 percent of all bananas grown