Wormy Banana (a repost)

My 80-year old mom is sitting at the kitchen table dissecting a banana as if it was a biology specimen under a microscope. I watch her for a few minutes intently before I ask her what she is doing. With a scientific look of Eureka discovery on her face, she tells me, she is looking for worms. Worms? She is 100 percent sure; the bananas I just bought at the grocery store have worms, especially since they had ripened enough to be extra sweet and mushy. She is peeling away and separating the banana core into smaller segments, believing that the tiny white fibers are worms.

I started to explain that they do not, but I stopped short. Mom spent most of her adult life in the Eastern European block where fruit flies were rampant and uncontrollable. Insecticides such as DDT, although banned in this country, were used on most crops and vegetables low to the ground, but it was difficult to spray powder on fruit trees in order to kill the pests that loved fruits as much as we did. Crop dusting by aerial spraying was not something the communist regime did. There was plenty manual labor around. The population needed employment in spite of the meager wages. Workers dusted or sprayed the chemicals themselves without masks or any protection for that matter.

I do not remember ever eating a fruit that did not have worms in it. Fruit flies deposited their eggs that grew into tiny, white worms that wiggled out of cherries, apples, pears, prunes, peaches, apricots as we took bites out of them. We could try to extricate the worms by cutting the fruit into sections without parasites in them, or could just eat it whole and unwashed, not worrying or thinking about the worms. They constituted, after all, extra protein, and we were starved for protein all the time. We were not vegetarians by choice. Meat was so hard to find except at Christmas time when country folks slaughtered pigs and the government supplied stores in town with extra meat in order to pacify the starving urban proletariat.

There were a few orchards slated for communist elite consumption or export and those were tended to carefully. The fruit was whole and untouched by parasitic fruit flies.

During Christmas holidays, small shipments of oranges and bananas came from Greece, Israel, and people fought over them in long lines at the state grocery store. Such rare delicacies were rationed to a few pieces per family. We were so excited to get the exotic fruits and free of worms!

There were no 10 pound bags of oranges similar to those we buy at Sam’s Club and no neat rows of perfect oranges or bunches of bananas like those that we find in American grocery stores every day. We take the abundance for granted because we have never experienced shortages of anything. We trust that whatever we need, will always be there, someone will grow them and ship them to our markets. But will they?

Mom finished her inspection of the “imperfect” banana. She threw it out with a huff, convinced that it had worms. Mom is blessed to have plenty of other food or fruits to satisfy her hunger. By the grace of God and a stroke of good luck, she lives in the land of plenty. She does not have to worry about her next meal. She has the luxury of throwing away good food that she mislabels wormy, tainted, or rotten. After all, there is so much food in this country and so cheap. Will we always be so lucky and have this luxury forever?

 

 

 

 

Price, Bananas, and a Pesky Soil Fungus from Asia

Keynesian economists tell us that under perfect competition, if there is no government interference and no central planning or directing, producers and consumers make uncoordinated decisions to produce exactly the quantity of each good that satisfies the equation MC=MU and scarce resources are allocated efficiently.

Marginal cost (MC) is the cost incurred by producing one additional unit of a commodity while marginal utility (MU) is the maximum amount of money a consumer is willing to pay for one more unit of a commodity.

To operate under perfect competition, an industry must have many small businesses and customers, an easily identifiable and homogeneous product that is identical when offered by any seller, new businesses can come into the market and old ones can exit easily without any impediments, and both businesses and consumers know the available products and prices.  By this definition, agricultural products fit the description well.

Under perfect competition, farmers are price takers - they must accept the price determined by the market’s supply and demand. Farmers do not just worry about the weather, droughts, hail, floods, frost, winds, weeds, and pests. They worry about how many other farmers decide to plant the exact same crops, all competing for same consumers unless they produce enough for export and the demand is great in other countries.

In the case of corn, with its use for ethanol and other biofuels, in the presence of “clean energy” production subsidies, the perfect competition pricing theory of Keynesian Economics is disturbed.

All is well and neat in perfect competition economic theory unless a pesky fungus interferes and destroys the banana crop.

Weather and competition from other growers can at times take a back seat to a dangerous variable, a newly emerging disease or pest that can wipe out the entire crop. Monocultures such as corn and bananas can be easy prey to an untreatable disease. Southern corn blight destroyed many crops until farmers hybridized the corn.

In the case of bananas that Americans consume, large growers in Latin America kept production uniform, running the risk that a new pathogen could destroy the entire crop.  Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida identified such a pathogen for bananas, a fungus called Tropical Race Four. It was kept under “wraps” for a while because farmers in Asia were planting small plots and, when the fungus hit, they lost just those small plots. As demand for bananas grew, larger farming operations appeared in order to satisfy the newly emerging markets around the globe.

This Tropical Race Four fungus found in soil is so dangerous and untreatable that, when the blight hits a farm, the banana plants turn yellow, wither, and die en masse. Burning boots is not exactly keeping the fungus from spreading since it can be carried on imported plant seedlings from Asia. Once the fungus reaches Latin America, the Cavendish banana crops could be devastated and the market could see a shortage and high prices.

Chiquita, Dole, and other banana producers grow the Cavendish bananas because they resist bruising and do not ripen fast, enabling exportation. Prior to the Cavendish variety, farmers in Latin America grew Gros Michel bananas which were devastated by the Panama Disease. The Cavendish variety replaced Gros Michel because it was resistant to the Panama Disease.

There are over 1,000 varieties of bananas, some engineered to survive pests and blights, others to satisfy epicurean palates. India grows 670 varieties of bananas. Ongoing research is trying to develop a variety resistant to this new fungal threat but Americans are leery of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), calling them Frankenfoods. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/culture-lifestyle/food-drink/121120/bananas-racer-four-fungus-honduras

Smaller scale production may have to replace giant farms that supply uniformity of bananas on American supermarkets at an affordable price.  Dan Koeppel, the author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” opined that diversity of production and small scale production will save the banana industry. If giant monocultures continue, a severe Tropical Race Four fungus blight could cause bananapocalypse.

My wise mom once said, with a very serious face, you can’t eat those brown-spotted bananas, they are wormy. Why would bananas be wormy? Because in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean fruit fly infestation is so bad, most fruits with spots are infected with worms. I am yet to see bananas or any other fruits with worms in this country.