Yes, We'Ll Have No Bananas Poem by gershon hepner

YES, WE’LL HAVE NO BANANAS

Bananas, now a monoculture,
everyone a Cavendish,
await the ecologic vulture,
and will die out soon like the fish
that disappear in every ocean
where mankind rapes the planet while
extinction, coming in slow motion,
is thriving in its morbid style.
The Cavendish replaced the Gros
Michel when overcome by blight,
and now is threatened by that blow,
and cannot rage against the night,
and we perhaps will all be forced
to eat more apples, plums and pears,
avoiding fruit that’s been outsourced
a hundred years. They’ll be the spares
we’ll use in order to replace
bananas when they disappear,
though girls will think it a disgrace
that they no more can learn to steer
their mouths on this erotic fruit
to learn the skills that Eve could not
provide, for though she played the flute,
the apple did not teach her what
bananas can. When they are gone
we’ll all lament the Cavendish;
without it, how will girls turn on
their men and give them what they wish?

Dan Koeppel writes among the imminent extinction of bananans (“Yes, We’ll Have No Bananas, ” NYT, June 18,2007) :
Thatbananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas. Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here. They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly — by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening….There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis…By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight. Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20….Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.


6/18/08