A New York Times Op-Ed raises the alarm about the looming banana shortage. I had heard about this problem a number of years ago -- that a fungal disease is making its way toward Latin America that could destroy the banana crop, which has freighteningly almost no genetic diversity, within 5 to 20 years. Apparently now the issue may be getting some traction, although what that means, I don't know.
We bought a miniature or dwarf banana plant a few years ago (the plant is miniature -- I am not sure about the bananas themselves). It takes the plant a number of years before it matures enough to bear fruit. Will it bear fruit in time for the impending collapse of the world banana market? Will we be the last remaining source of bananas?
The world would be a much lesser place if we didn’t have bananas. Here’s Harry Belafonte and Fozzy Bear to tell us about it:
I’ve always been a bit curious about what exactly a "hand" was ("six hand, seven hand, eight hand, bunch!"), although I guess never quite curious enough to look it up. It turns out that a "hand" is a tier of bananas, and that each "bunch" can contain between five and twenty hands.
And I also learned that a banana is not actually a true fruit, but is rather a false, or epigynous, berry, which is distinguished by having an inferior ovary.
Which, of course, is more information than you wanted to know, but also less. It is more important to shelter the little ones from any discussion about science or, heaven help us, reproductive parts--like ovaries. Because, as we are about to discover, nothing testifies to the genius of creation as well as the banana. Queue up the insanity:
Yeah, that shifts thoughts away from reproductive parts, doesn't it?
