Will Bananas Split?

So very much has happened since we last editorialized about bananas. It’s a goofy but perfect fruit, delicious, nutritious, grows in its own biodegradable wrapper and provides vital income and calories for an estimated 500 million people on this planet. But according to respected French scientist Emile Frison, yes, we could have no bananas in 10 years’ time. His claim, based on projections of crippling fungi advancing through tropical soils not unlike the great Irish potato blight, has ignited global debate. And it may also help grow more funding for Frison’s plan to make bananas only the third plant genome to be mapped.

Here’s the real threat to bananas: They’re genetic freaks. All clones. Every last one of them. No sex for eunuch bananas. Some 10,000 years ago, the theory goes, primitive folks didn’t consume wild bananas, which are mostly seeds. Then someone found mutant seedless bananas and cultivated them from cuttings. Ever since, all edible bananas are identical. That’s great, if you don’t like munching seeds in your gushy fruits. But clones don’t have genetic diversity from natural mating and gene mixing, making them susceptible to natural assailants that do evolve and propagate precipitously.

Fifty years ago, the Panama disease wiped out the main Gros Michel banana variety. Fortunately, the resistant Cavendish strain was developed. But now it’s widely threatened by new fungi evolving resistance to chemical sprays faster than plants develop defenses.

Frison’s goal is to find bananas’ disease-resistant gene and plant it in other strains. But fruit growers resist genetically modified fruits, fearing a backlash of incoherent but costly consumer fears. “Frankenstein Bananas Go to Market!”

As delicious as it sounds to tangelo growers, a banana-free world is unimaginable. No banana splits or banana cream pies. No banana bread. No comedic pratfalls. What first food would babies spit up? With banana extinction, what would “going bananas” and “top banana” mean? Would “banana republic” then mean an extinct tropical dictatorship? And what could school lunch traders offer to replace the trusty banana in those clandestine Twinkie deals?

That’s got to frighten, even if you eat only five or six bananas every day, keeping up with bewildering, inflationary healthful-food advisories. What are we up to now -- 47 servings of fruit daily? Eat this. Eat that. Don’t eat this. Don’t eat that. Drink this. No, don’t! Well, all right, but only one glass a day. If we all ate what we’re supposed to in the quantities recommended, there wouldn’t be time to earn the money to buy the recommended food. Or map banana genes. And at life’s end -- although theoretically life would have no end because we’d be eating so well -- what’s to remember except chewing a lot? Just our banana memories.