Parable of the banana

Thought experiment: imagine that one vast banana tree is the world's sole supply of the yellow fruit.

Now imagine the tree is dying from an incurable disease.

Actually, with some poetic license, that is the case.

Bananas have seeds, and that is how they grow in the wild. But cultivated varieties are propagated by cuttings, a process sometimes called "suckering." They are genetically the same plant, vast plantations of cutting clones of a single ortet.

The primary cultivated variety of banana, and really the only one sold in North America, is the Cavendish. And it is sick.

Yes, we have no bananas

Before the rise of Cavendish, the non-tropical Western world ate Gros Michel, a banana brought from Malaysia to the Caribbean in the late 18th Century. 

Michel succumbed to Panama Disease, a fungus, in the 1950s, and Cavendish filled the void.

Today botanists and industry anticipate a similar fate for the Cavendish, this time at the hands of another strain of Panama Disease.

In Asia and some other places, the Cavendish is not the only banana cultivar. In the tropics, you might find a choice of bananas at Farmers market. (Cool idea for a blog?)

Here in America, however, you can't choose from an assortment of bananas the way you can, say, apples.

(I have seen tiny red-skinned bananas in specialty shops, though not lately.)

South American growers for a time staved off the bananapocalypse though the unsustainable practice of clear-cutting rainforest to create new and (initially) undiseased plantations. But disease has a way of catching up.

So, soon, industry will likely anoint a single successor and sucker those suckers across many vast plantations. Then we'll see a change at the supermarket. 

Sources say the Gros Michel tasted better that the Cavendish. Maybe we will get lucky this time, maybe not. Taste is secondary.

The moral of the story? Well several, but one thing to note is the vulnerability of monocultures, of acre after acre planted with genetically identical crops. 

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Apples

Now suppose there were only one breed of apple. 

Not going to happen, conditions are just different. But suppose.

In that case, you wouldn't say, I like me some Honeycrisp, or, I'm going to get a couple of Northern Spy for a pie. You'd just get apples, and they would always be the same thing.

One minor casualty would be this blog, since there would essentially be nothing to write about. (Well, maybe you could still do this.) 

But the big loss is that we would lose the flavors, the variety, the great names, the stories. 

In place of that: one generic apple.

I don't know what the apple would be. Probably something like a Fuji, or else a Red Delicious. Something reliable, durable, and rounded down to offend no one.

But we'd call it "apple," just as we call the Cavendish "banana."

Only a thought experiment, thank goodness. 

Still, it is worth noting that despite some 17 thousand recorded apple varieties (not all of them great to be sure), including more than 2,000 in North America, if you walk into an American supermarket you will be lucky to find seven choices. 

And six of them will be very similar.

Also, the big growers and retailers think that's too many. They are uncertain about what to grow and worried about guessing wrong. A few well-established varieties would be more efficient. 

And why stop at "a few"?

So imagine one vast orchard of "apple," from sea to shining sea. What could go wrong?

The perils of monoculture

The Baldwin apple, once upon a time, was king in my part of the world. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of trees. 

It's a great apple and was justly popular; there is even a statue of it near here.

Baldwin, it turned out, was vulnerable to extreme cold. In February of 1934, the mercury dropped below -10 degrees (that is, colder than ten below zero Fahrenheit) for several nights, and the trees died. (Farmers replanted McIntosh.)

Baldwin had thrived for more than a century before that killing cold wave came along.

That's a vulnerability of monocultures, and a problem with the impulse to rationalize and simplify agriculture generally. 

Everything is great, until it isn't, and then it isn't everywhere.

An analogous economic crisis hit America's apple industry in the 1980s, when the public finally turned against the reign of Red Delicious. 

The apple had been sported practically beyond recognition, and the farms in Washington State were caught in a Delicious bubble, which burst.

The American apple inventory, according to a recent study, is "vulnerable to evolving pests and pathogens and a changing climate" because it is highly dependent on a few varieties for what genetic diversity it possesses. 

This population, in other words, is inbred, with the risk that a single disease could take down a lot of trees at once.

Thousands of apples

Eat for sustenance and pleasure, not principle. If Fuji's your thing, go with it (though you could try something else from time to time).

Nonetheless the world, and our food supply, is a richer place for all these pesky different kinds of apples.

Celebrating that is what I do here.