Yes, We have no bananas…
OK, I normally talk about guns, ships, planes, combat, and the coming zombie apocalypse, so why bananas today?
Well…
Remember eating those awesome Gros Michel variety of bananas back in the 1930s? What? you weren’t around back then? Well, don’t worry neither was I. But that’s the thing. The Gros Michel variety, often known as Big Mike, was THE most common banana on the market. They were bigger and thicker than what we eat now (all phallic jokes aside), which is the Cavendish.
Big Mike: big and round like a potato
Cavendish: Curved and slim (all of this is sounding too funny, but stick with me)
Bananas, as we know them, cannot reproduce. The ones we eat are sterile hybrids. Like mules. That means they can’t evolve. They don’t spread their seed like other fruits, baby banana trees are taken from cuttings off adult trees– which means every banana we eat, is genetically the same.
Clones.
Which means they can’t evolve away from viruses that prey on them.
This is why the Big Mike is almost extinct (at least in so much as the grocery stores in the US are concerned) and odds are if you were born after 1950 or so– you haven’t ever had one.
You see Mike got taken out by a virus.
The 1923 musical hit “Yes, We Have No Bananas” comes from a shortage of the “Big Mike” bananas, which began with the infestation of Panama disease early in the 20th century