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Okay so my writers said if I don’t do the intro they wrote they’re going to unionize,
so here goes. (To the tune of Hollaback Girl) This episode is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Ok?
I can’t wait to see which one of you samples that for your Soundcloud. Anyways,
welcome to the Banana Bonanza: an episode that not only is bananas, but is also about bananas,
because what’s going on with bananas is, frankly, pretty bananas. This is the Cavendish banana. It’s
basically the banana—the one you put in your smoothies and on your yogurt and on your pizza
if you’re a godless monster—but in the next few decades, those bananas will be gone. Disappeared.
Wiped out. Donezo. Kaput. These things? They’ll be like Youtube Red, Zunes, and Ellen Denegeres’
reputation as a nice person: a thing of the past. But don’t panic: it turns out, this
isn’t the first time our nanners have been nabbed. Have you ever heard one of the olds talk about how
things were better in their day? The streets were cleaner and the bananas were sweeter and
women and minorities didn’t want so many darn rights? Well turns out they were correct. Not
about the racism and misogyny, but about the bananas. You see, back in your grandparents’ day,
when your nan wanted to nom on a nanner, she would reach not for a Cavendish, but a Gros Michel:
a sweeter, and apparently better tasting variety that accounted for most bananas eaten up until the
1950s. And to be clear, Gros Michel isn’t just a name for a general type of bananas; Gros Michels
were the same banana—clones produced from planting cuttings from the best specimens, which were then
cloned again, and so on and so on. But then came a fungus that sounds like it’s named after a car
racing video game—Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race 1, or TR 1 if you’re lazy, and it said “hey,
wouldn’t it be cool if I killed all the bananas,” and then, it did, entering the plants through the
root and then cutting off the flow of nutrients and water coursing through its vessels, thus
starving the plant out. Essentially, this fungus wasn’t like the fun ones you tried in college, or
the slimy ones you pushed off your plate in high school, but a plant version of Alien—a parasitic,
“I’m the captain now,” type fungi. TR 1 quickly spread throughout the world, all but extincting
our favorite banana, forcing the CIA to overthrow multiple democratically elected leaders in South
America, and Americans to eat Cavendishes. It turns out, our hankering for banankers hadn’t
gone away, and so, we swapped out the Gros Michel for the worse tasting, but immune to TR 1 banana,
the Cavendish. Today, all the banana supply chains are set up specifically for Cavendishes, which
account for 99% of all exported bananas globally. But it turns out that Cavendishes weren’t
the super-immune bananas we might have hoped for—and now, there’s another fungus among us.
It’s called the Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race 4. Basically it’s the sequel to TR 1—it’s got
better graphics and faster render times and more importantly, it can infect Cavendish bananas. In
2019, TR 4, for the first time, made landfall in the Americas, leading to a declaration of
emergency in Colombia on August 8, 2019, and a hush hush meeting on whether or not they should
lean back into the Colombian bam bam economy. To be clear, TR 4 is no new fungal phenomena—it’s
been around since the 1980s, and while originally isolated in Taiwan, it’s now spread across Asia,
Africa, and the Middle East, crippling Cavendish Crops. Now, you’re probably wondering,
“if this TR 4 thing has been an issue for a long time, why haven’t we solved it? After all,
poverty, inequality, racism, and environmental degradation were problems for a long time and
we’ve solved those. Surely containing a deadly, fast-spreading illness would be easy, right?”
Well, it turns out this fungus is a tricky bugger. Once a farm is infected, spores can stay in the
dirt for decades, which means boots, tires, and even runoff from a rainstorm can carry TR 4 from
one field to the next where it will then hop from one root system to the next. The Colombians have
done just about everything they could to stop it: increased their control efforts at all ports and
airports and rail terminals, began disinfecting boots and never swapping plants farm to farm,
and any farm on which it is discovered gets shut down and all plants are eradicated:
but the fungus is still spreading. Making matters worse, scientists are yet to find
any natural fungicide or retrofitted military grade chemical that can kill off this fungi,
all of which is to say that TR 4 is well on its way to being by far the worst pandemic of the
21st century, leading to a dystopian existence with no… more… Cavendish… bananas. Experts say
it’s not a question of whether the Cavendish will be eliminated, but of when. Even scarier—there’s
no alternative banana strain waiting in the balance to replace the Cavendish should this be
the end. A genetically modified Cavendish that’s immune to TR 4 may be our only salvation—but
it’s far from clear if we mindful mindless consumers will be willing to embrace GMO nanners.
In the end, even if the Cavendish does go the way of other defunct foods like Crisco,
Pudding Pops, and vegetables in general—at least for me—there will still likely be
a few left grown on small farms, which I know because that’s what has happened to the Gros
Michels. How do I know? Because I spent $116 buying exactly 14 of them from the only Gros
Michel banana vendor in America and getting them shipped to me. Seriously, I really did
that. And by the way it’s your fault; too many of you watched these videos, giving me enough
ad revenue to blow over a hundred bucks on vintage bananas… and here they are. So let’s try them. Uh…
yeah, they’re pretty good. Sweeter. Totally… worth it. Ooookay now let’s get some more banana money.
So, I told you on Tuesday and I’ll tell you again: we’ve got a brand-new Nebula original, at least
its first part, coming out next week, titled “Sam from Wendover Presents: A Very Good Trivia Show,
Presented by Sam from Wendover,” where we’ve got people, doing a trivia show, and it’s very good.
What’s also very good is CuriosityStream’s current sale pricing—it’s less than $1 a month,
which is crazy! Until our original comes out, you could watch any one of CuriosityStream’s
thousands of top-quality documentaries and non-fiction TV shows, like their own new original,
which rounds up the top stories in science in 2020. Or, you could watch any one of the originals
that I and my fellow creators made for Nebula, but make sure to tune back in next week for A
Very Good Trivia Show. This sale ends soon, so make sure to head over to CuriosityStream.com/HAI
and get the bundle deal for less than $1 a month and, amazingly at those prices,
you’ll be helping support myself and so many other independent creators in the process.