Beyond the Banana

[ThreeEyesOni]

Link

Originally Posted by Snip

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.


There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon – in five, 10 or 30 years – the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist.

This is one of the first atricles that I've seen on this is a while, and I thought I'd post it here. It's one of those sad situations that makes me laugh a little; the idea of there being no bananas as we know them in as few as 60 years is rather disturbing to me. They're far from my favorite fruit, but a lack of them would be odd to say the least.

Perhaps now's the time to build a greenhouse.

When bananas are extinct, only crazy bastards with hermetically sealed greenhouses will have bananas. >_>

[Renatus]

They won't go extinct, the doomsday vaults most likely have several banana samples stored.

[I Am Great.]

As far as I know, they're growing them in isolated chambers in the bio domes in the UK, along with a whole load of other shit.

[ThreeEyesOni]

Oh, I'm sure it would be unlikely for the disease to spread to EVERY last tree, but that doesn't mean that you'd ever see a banana again at a reasonable rate. :P

[Godslayer Jillian]

Ring ring ring ring potatophone!
I can live with that.

[ThreeEyesOni]

I'm gonna go eat a banana coated in honey while I still can. >_>

Poor bananas and bees.

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

What I think is funny is that the term Banana Republic has been appropriated by a clothing store and turned quite docile. I'll have a good laugh every time I see that store, now.

The Dutch did the same thing with carrots. There used to be red and purple and yellow and white ones as well as orange ones, but at some point, the Dutch decided that the orange ones were best, so that's what they started growing. Someone recently found some still-growable carrot seeds of all sorts of other varieties of carrots, so he started growing them.

Damn these tyranies of people! What if other people want different bananas? There should be a whole variety of them. Not everyone likes Cavendish Bananas. The companies would be able to reach a wider range of people if they sold more than one type of banana.

Looks like my Dad was right, though. He was always prophesizing the doom of bananas...
I wonder what the Gros Michel banana was like...

[HumanePain]

Well then, plantains will have to do.

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

I'm hoping people will change to those little red bananas from Haiti that my former co-worker told me about.
*blinks* I ought to try a plantain. *makes mental note to get one at grocery store next time* Guh. Why does my lack of plantain-trying make me feel like a horrible person?

[CptSternn]

Originally Posted by ThreeEyesOni

I'm gonna go eat a banana coated in honey while I still can. >_>

Poor bananas and bees.

If the bees go we are all screwed. There was a sci-fi book about the end of the world written a while back that was all about this. It was written before the current bee situation.

The bottom line is if bees die off, then most all fruit plants also will go, and therefore over half of the worlds food resources go along with them. After they are gone then the other resources follow within a few years because the loss of fruits from the food chain cause everything else to die as well.

[Tumor]

I'm not too worried about bananas. We selectively bred them into what they are once, we can do it again.

[JCC]

THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS BETTER SAVE THE DAMN BANANAS! A BANANA'S LIFE IS SACRED TOO DAMN IT!

Bananas are my favourite fruit. If they die... I die.

[korinna5555]

Originally Posted by CptSternn

If the bees go we are all screwed. There was a sci-fi book about the end of the world written a while back that was all about this. It was written before the current bee situation.

The bottom line is if bees die off, then most all fruit plants also will go, and therefore over half of the worlds food resources go along with them. After they are gone then the other resources follow within a few years because the loss of fruits from the food chain cause everything else to die as well.

Yeah, pretty much.



My mom is very allergic to bananas. This article will make her happy..

[Renatus]

Originally Posted by CptSternn

If the bees go we are all screwed. There was a sci-fi book about the end of the world written a while back that was all about this. It was written before the current bee situation.

The bottom line is if bees die off, then most all fruit plants also will go, and therefore over half of the worlds food resources go along with them. After they are gone then the other resources follow within a few years because the loss of fruits from the food chain cause everything else to die as well.

They probobly have something to cover the bees as well, they would be fools to save the seeds but not the bees as well. Though the recovery time for the bees might take a little while.

[Drake Dun]

No. NO. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[††BlackRose††]

NO NOT THE BANANAS AND THE HONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This seriously sucks!!!!

It makes you wonder what other fruits and vegetables we had that went extinct.