Yes, we have no bananas.

Frankly, I don’t like them. Tasteless sticks of Potassium (and if your blood levels are over 5 or under 4 you’re actually in a world of hurt as I found out the last time my doctors tried to kill me), but fortunately there are other choices like Orange Juice and Spinach that also provide some of the “fiber” benefits (about which I will speak no more).

We used to have good tasting bananas (I’m 120+ years old, do the math), a variety called Gros Michel that is virtually extinct due to a fungus called Panama Disease which is odd because it first appeared in Australia. Your current supermarket banana is is a Cavendish which is eminently shippable and tastes like dirt.

It’s also a GMO, a clone propogated by monoculture by global agri-businesses like Dole and United Fruit (Chiquita) and it is threatened by a variant of Panama Disease called Tropical Race 4.

Now, leaving aside the culpability of Chiquita in fomenting inumerable wars in Central America (umm… why do you think they call them “banana republics”), let’s listen to the WaPo about why, exactly, this is a bad idea-

The reason the original disease and its latest permutation are so threatening to bananas is largely a result of the way in which we have cultivated the fruit. While dozens of different varieties are grown around the world, often in close proximity to one another, commercially produced bananas are all the same (quite literally in fact, because they are effectively clones of each other).

This helps companies like Dole and Chiquita control for consistency and produce massive amounts of bananas on the cheap without having to deal with imperfections (it’s the reason why the fruit is so easy to find at supermarkets everywhere). But it also makes their bananas incredibly vulnerable to attacks from pests and disease. When you get rid of variety entirely, you risk exposing a crop to something it can neither cope with nor evolve to defend itself against.

The Irish Potato Blight is a perfect example of how monocultures can backfire. In the 1800s, Irish potato farmers came to favor a single potato variety, which backfired when a fungus-like organism entered the country and met no natural resistance. In 1846, the country, which depended heavily on potatoes for basic nutrition, lost most of its potato production, which, in turn, contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The virtual extinction of the Gros Michel is an apt example, too. When the first strain of the Panama Disease appeared in Latin America, there was nothing to stop it.

Oh, the song. It was actually inspired by the banana blight.