("Hickory Tick" by
Warner/Chappell Production Music)
- Most people don't know
anything about bananas.
(upbeat music)
That's the beauty of them.
It's just this sort of, like, mundane
super ubiquitous thing
that's in everybody's
kitchen and in everybody's
bowl of cornflakes.
The banana we eat is just
one of over a thousand
different banana breeds.
This one banana was actually
not the first banana
that Americans ate.
The first banana was a
totally different breed
called the Gros Michel and it went extinct
mostly through neglect and
banana industry stupidity.
Bananas were basically unheard of
in non-banana growing climates
until about 1875, and
then the banana industry
began with a couple of entrepreneurs
starting a company called United Fruit.
Their marketing strategy
was to sell bananas
for half the price of apples.
Think about it, apples
are grown everywhere
in the United States.
Bananas are grown thousands of miles away
and go bad in two weeks, and yet by 1900,
the banana industry had passed the apple,
and they never looked back.
But the banana was immediately attacked
by a fungus called Panama Disease
because that's where it was discovered
and the banana industry
spent the next 50 years
running away from this
fungus until by 1960,
the original Gros Michel banana
was functionally extinct,
meaning they couldn't
be grown commercially.
The Cavendish was a
last minute replacement.
It was considered a bad banana.
It isn't tough enough, really.
It had to be boxed instead
of just thrown into a boat.
It didn't ripen properly,
and it didn't taste good,
but finally they had to
adopt it and the Cavendish
took over the world's banana's market.
Unfortunately, the
lesson of Panama Disease
which was, don't have a mono-culture,
don't put all your bananas in one basket,
if you're a business, was lost,
because they thought everything
was going to be fine.
Let's fast forward 50
more years and guess what,
a new version of Panama Disease has hit
the Cavendish crop and
it has been spreading
for the past 10 years worldwide.
Panama Disease is so
virulent that if I stepped
on a piece of infected dirt in Australia,
flew a plane to Costa Rica,
and walked through a banana field,
all of Costa Rica could be
infected within a few years.
And it's really important
because people rely on bananas
in other parts of the
world as their main source
of nutrition, so when bananas get sick,
people die, and it's this
lighthearted, sort of fruit.
Behind it is some real
tragedy and real potential
for tragedy.
(upbeat music)
There's two things regular people can do.
Number one is to have
a more open mind about
genetic modification, genetic engineering.
The GMO industry in the United States
has done its own damage to itself.
They're not trustworthy.
They're pretty evil.
But the technology itself is just science,
and to say to the banana
we're gonna need diversity,
and part of that diversity
is gonna be a genetically
modified banana, I'm sure of it.
The second way is
support banana diversity.
I mean, it sounds crazy and
you're gonna be looked at
as insane if you go up
to your marketing manager
at Whole Foods and say, by
the way, there's 600 bananas,
why do you only sell one?
But really, that's how it has to happen.
I have a banana dream
of a supermarket filled
with different varieties
and it's in Los Angeles,
not in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
not in Thailand, and I think
that dream can come true.
I may be bananas, but yeah,
I think it could happen.
("Hickory Tick" by
Warner/Chappell Production Music)
(upbeat instrumental notes)
