Complex Numbers

Going Bananas

It's a promo on LitHub for a book, but whatever. We're all readers here. And it tracks with what I already knew.

    How the Banana Came To Be—And How It Could Disappear  
Emily Monosson on the History, Evolution, and Biological Enemies of a Staple Fruit

Yesterday, I bought some bananas, and noticed that since the summer, they had doubled in price!

...from 12 cents each to 24.

(This is one reason you have to beware of that sort of emotional language when you encounter it.)

I still find it difficult to believe that a banana's actual worth, a couple thousand miles from where they're grown, is less than a quarter. I'm sure there are all sorts of subsidy shenanigans going on, and low-paid workers involved, but I can't be arsed to research it.

Bananas are a fruit that unites the world.

Not so sure about that, but as fruits go, they're definitely one of the easiest. Peel and eat, no messy juice, no seeds. I saw a video once where a creationist took that and ran with it as "proof" of intelligent design. Well, they were intelligently designed, all right: by intelligent humans, who genetically engineered a seed-infested fruit with very little meat and turned it into a snack as easy to eat as a Milky Way bar.

Though there are thousands of varieties, most of us in the western world eat only one: the Cavendish.

Or, as we tend to call them here in the US, "bananas."

Of the twenty-​two million tons of bananas exported to the United States, Europe, and Asia, most are grown in Latin America and the Caribbean.

I still remember a brief tour of a banana plantation in Belize. But this article goes into a lot more detail around the growing and shipping process, which I'm not going to repeat here.

The banana plant is easy to mistake for a tree, but it is the largest known herbaceous flowering plant.

This is a distinction much like tomato being, botanically, a fruit.

The plants grow, produce flower and fruit, and die.

Ready-made metaphor there.

The article also goes into the rise and fall of the previous kind of shipped banana, the Gros Michel (commonly translated to English as "Big Mike," but I prefer "Fat Mikey.") That's fairly widespread knowledge now, as is the whispers, going on for some years now, of the soon to be certain demise of the Cavendish.

Hasn't happened yet, but with banana prices doubling here, maybe it's happening?

What the article doesn't get into is whether there's a suitable, fungus-resistant successor to the Cavendish. We can be pretty clever with our bioengineering and selective breeding, so I expect they'll find a way. Otherwise, based on the numbers in this article, a whole lot of people are going to find themselves unemployed.

And, worse, I'll have to find another easy fruit to like. And that, for me, holds no ap-peel.