Going Bananas

Don't think about it too hard

How far are you from a banana? Can you look up right now to see a few poking out of a bowl or hung on a hook, dangling like ornaments? Perhaps you are, as I so often am, out of bananas. Think, just for the fun of it, if your life depended on it, how fast could you get a hold of a banana? Seconds, minutes? For most of us, faster than we could harvest anything edible outside. 

Have you ever eaten a banana right off the tree? Me neither. 

Plant to ground, machete to bunch, hands to boxes, boxes to trucks, trucks to big containers, stacked like legos on an enormous metal whale belching black smoke. Back to trucks, to stores, to hands, to your kitchen counter. 

Wars have been fought, governments toppled, people killed, and countries created to bring us bananas. An exotic fruit, cheaper than an apple that could grow on a tree outside my window. One I need with my cereal or slathered with peanut butter or eaten like a monkey, upside down, or is it right side up, since isn’t that how they grow? 

Every banana you’ve ever eaten is the same banana. Not in some esoteric we’re-all connected-type of way. It’s a clone called the Cavendish banana. Sounds English because it is. The 6^th Duke of Devonshire grew the current banana we all know in a greenhouse in England. Well, he almost certainly didn’t, but his gardener did. 

Why do we eat this English bananas grown in the tropics? Until the 1950’s the mass produced banana was called Gros Michel (that’s Spanish for ‘Big Michael') until a disease known as the Panama disease wiped those mono-plantations off the face of the earth. Panama disease, perhaps unsurprisingly, originated in Southeast Asian. That’s racist so let’s move on. 

The Cavendish banana, though less tasty, seemed to be able to grow in the same fields of the now rotting Gros Michel. The brilliant strategy was employed to once again clone millions of the exact same tree for the new plantations. 

Mono means one. A mono-culture is one culture, which really means no culture. A desert. Nature tends not to want to be a desert where otherwise there’d be a jungle so she enacted her own plans and birthed a fungal spore out of the ground that rots the banana bush from the inside. Oh how we tried all the tricks of chemistry, spraying every cocktail of poisons those lab creatures could slop together. Nothing worked. 

And after a fifty year delay, the fungus is now attacking the Cavendish banana, migrating to the Americans just a few years ago.

I’m not worried about it though. Smart people in starched white lab coats with big grant money are busy slicing and dicing genes and crossing their fingers. I’ve been told it’s all safe, and maybe it is, though I wonder who is going to own all those patented Frankentrees?

Think about it too hard and you might go bananas.

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