The banana, as we know it, is not the banana that our grandparents knew and enjoyed. And this contemporary banana is in danger of extinction due to a new strain of Panama disease. Or so says The Scientist, which appears to be parroting alarmist reports debunked by Snopes a few years ago. The Vietnamese Cavendish banana is the one commonly exported to the United States. But it is, by no means, the only banana cultivar out there. What this may mean is that the Cavendish banana, a less lusher fruit than the Gros Michael banana decimated in the 1950s, will be replaced by an even more derivative and genetically mutated banana. Unless some pesticide is introduced which is able to decimate this latest Panama strain. The biggest regret amidst this hysteria is that there isn’t a single cultural figure who comes even close to Carmen Miranda who can put all this into perspective.
Are Reports of the Banana’s Extinction Greatly Exaggerated?
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
I heard awhile back and the guy sounded convincing enough, and also like we are really missing out on the world’s best bananas here in the U.S. of A.
Okay, that didn’t work for some reason. So here’s the direct link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19097412
The Snopes write up isn’t one of their best. True, there are hundreds of other cultivars but the wild cultivars are being lost due to the loss of forests so genetic diversity is being reduced in the wild too. Also most cultivars are not very tasty (think plaintains), have woody seeds, or are difficult to ship. There’s one variety that is blue and has the taste of vanilla icecream but cannot be shipped as it ripens within days and rots equally quickly and bruises too easily for transport.
When most of the articles predicting the demise of the banana were written, there were no suitable alternatives and the banana companies were test marketing red bananas as a replacement, needless to say the public did not embrace the red bananas and there were problems in shipping them to market before they rotted or got damaged.
However, recently a successful cross between the Gros Michel and a Brazilian Apple Banana was achieved called “Golden Fingers” (FHIA-1) which had the taste of apples. The “Golden Finger” was test marketed but the tart taste was seen as out of place by most consumers but it became the leading candidate to replace the Cavendish. Since then there have been many crosses, many of which were only suitable as cooking bananas (plaintains) but this has culminated with the Kabana-4 (FHIA-23) which has the appearance of a Gros Michel but the taste of a Cavendish and similar shipping requirements as the Cavendish.
Many nurseries have been misrepresenting this cultivar as the Gros Michel resulting in many gardeners believing that the Gros Michel tastes no different then the Cavendish. So we will have a grocery store banana that is similar enough to what we have now that the change will go unnoticed by most of the public so the crisis is over for now but the genetic diversity of the bana continues to shrink with the ongoing deforestation througout the world.
The Snopes article is technically true but it does the industry a disservice to label the extinction as false. The extinction is happening, and at one point we did not have good commercial options but now we have the commercial options and will live to see another day or rather decade while our ability to address such problems are dissappearing with the forests.