Bananapocalypse now?

“Yes! We have no bananas. We have no bananas today!”  1923 hit song

It was funny when Jimmy Durante crooned it and when Spike Jones embellished it. Kellogg’s even used it to sell cornflakes,

 But if this old 1920s ditty comes true, it’ll be no laughing matter.

It’s happened once and it just might happen again

Yeah, there are bananas by the bunch still on sale at the Kwik Trip … for now anyway … but the government of Colombia declared a state of national emergency when the Fusarium Wilt - Tropical Race 4 (TR4) fungus was discovered infecting Colombian banana plantations. The fungus is fatal to infected banana plants, spreads easily, and is all but undetectable until the infestation is well established. There is no remedy.

Sounds a little like Ebola strikes breakfast…

The scary thing is that it’s happened before, and not that long ago. A close relative of TR4 -- conveniently nicknamed TR1 – swept through the world’s banana groves seven decades ago and wiped out what was then the world’s favorite banana, the Gros Michel. Fortunately for the world’s soda fountains and fruit-and-cereal lovers, a reasonably good tasting, fungus resistant banana, the Cavendish, was waiting in the wings and quickly replaced the Gros Michel in the fields and on the grocers’ shelves.

But TR4 kills the Cavendish and there’s no replacement fruit ready to fill the bill, leaving folks to wonder if the traditional banana split may be on the verge of becoming simply a split.

It’s enough to make a sober monkey nervous, the thought of millions of smoothie-deprived soccer moms going into withdrawal on their way to yoga class. Just one more sure fire indication that the world really is going bananas.

Trouble is, as any O’Brian, O’Malley, Sullivan, Mayo or Fitzpatrick’s great-great-great-grandfather would be sure to tell ya, the matter behind it all is nothing at all to be laughing at. It’s for a particularly grim reason so many of us celebrate St. Paddy’s Day – in the summer of 1845, the produce  of acres and acres of Irish potato fields all but overnight turned to so much putrid black slime. A fungal blight was the cause and before the ensuing Great Potato Famine came to an end more than a million would die and more than a million would flee.

What made the potato blight so deadly … what makes TR4 and TR1 before it so deadly is the extreme genetic uniformity of the crops they infect. Vast monocultures of plants sharing the same characteristics, the same strengths and the same – often unknown – vulnerabilities.  It’s the Achilles’ heel of the monoculture, the ticking time bomb planted in the efficiently uniform fields and orchards that feed us all.

Yes, it’s true enough that few of our lives rise and fall with the price and abundance of imported bananas, and there were a whole lot of other things contributing to the Irish Great Hunger besides rotten potatoes, but the fact is that the basic crops we all depend on are the products of a gene pool that grows shallower by the generation. Specialized hybridization has boosted yields and made it ever cheaper for us to grow ever fatter, but those millions of acres of near identical stalks of corn, wheat, beans and barley may well harbor a weakness just waiting for a random mutant mold spore to discover and exploit, leaving us all to very suddenly grow very hungry.

 Being as I’m a fellow with a deep aversion to going hungry, I find this to be an issue of gut level concern.

And I’m not even particularly fond of bananas.