Monday, June 2, 2008

Yes, We Have No Disease-Resistant Bananas


On a traffic light green means go and yellow means yield,
but on a banana it's just the opposite.
Green means hold on, yellow means go ahead,
and red means where the fuck did you get that banana at...


Well, there goes the yellow phallic neighborhood. To sum up:

The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one — known as the Gros Michel — was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct. Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies — Chiquita and Dole — because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease... But now, Panama disease is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions...

Now this is serious... but I can't be the only one who giggled a little bit at the idea of being an identified 'banana scientist'.

And he wants you!

I can't believe I had that image on standby...

And on a completely unrelated topic, GOlgo 13 kicks everyone's ass.



Everyone's.

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