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Some plantain talk about a favorite fruit

By Ed Goldman

When I saw the headline “Scientists See Hope in Race to Breed Banana of Future,” I felt the same rush of excitement I would have at the announcement that RCA was manufacturing a color TV. Wow, I’d have thought then and do now: Tomorrow is here and so am I!

I understand if you’re puzzled by my linking an electronic breakthrough in 1953 (when the first TV show was broadcast in color) with the promise of a space-age banana (in October of 2024). For one thing, I was still in ankle-biting mode in 1953 so could hardly have been expected to comprehend the significance of color TV suddenly being available to the masses. 

Besides, those masses had to have massive amounts of money: a 12-inch set was priced at $1,000 in 1953, which would be nearly $41,000 today. My dad was a New York City firefighter back then, earning about $77 per week. That’d be around $1,730 today. It wasn’t likely my family would’ve been hanging around a department store loading dock anxiously awaiting the arrival of the color-TV truck. 

But a banana of the future: that’s something I think I’ll be able to afford. And even feel good about.

 “The bananas in grocery stores in the 1950s were a different variety from the bananas available today,” the Wall Street Journal recently reported. “They were called Gros Michels (often translated as Big Mikes), and crops were wiped out after a fungal disease called Tropical Race 1 tore through plantations.”

Not to worry. “A cousin, the Cavendish, was naturally resistant to the disease, so banana companies planted it everywhere,” the story continues. Today, the Cavendish represents 99 percent of the global banana export market, which totaled $14.4 billion in 2022.” That, friends, is a lot of bananas, and may go a long way toward explaining why there are so many spoiled bananas around, all of which end up being baked into banana bread and sold without irony as “fresh pastry” in coffee shops.  

I’ve always had a love/hate/who-the-hell-cares? attitude about bananas.

I loved how my dad used to pour chunks of them into a dish of sour cream, add sugar and serve it to me for lunch with heavily buttered white toast and jam. My dad had a sweet tooth, in case you hadn’t guessed. Actually, many sweet teeth. In retrospect, I’m inclined to think he had one meat tooth and the rest were on a lifelong quest to contract diabetes.

When I was growing up, TV commercials always showed kids putting bananas atop their cold or hot cereal. I tried it a few times—I’ve always been highly suggestible, which is why I have some bitcoins to unload—but found the bananas didn’t leave enough room for the cereal or milk.

But then there was Chiquita Banana, the cartoon vamp based on Carmen Miranda, a lovely Portuguese-Brazilian singer/comedian who used to appear on stage and in movies wearing elevator high-heels and sky-high hats containing enough produce to rival the food pyramid.