Hello lovely email friends. You’re looking incredible, by the way. Seriously, that weird new-year regime you’re following, whatever it was you took up or gave up, it’s working wonders.
Satirical Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was newsworthy last year when his work America, a solid gold toilet, was stolen from Blenheim Palace. Then last month he taped a regular banana to the wall at a Miami art fair. Two of the three editions of this work, titled Comedian, sold for $120,000 each. While the art world and press pondered whether the work is valid commentary or just elaborate money-laundering, I was left thinking very literally about its subject.
Bananas: There’s lots to like about bananas, not least the many health benefits ranging from improving your mood to regulating your blood pressure. Amazingly, and a little bafflingly, the health benefits differ as bananas ripen but, unless you’re a crushing health bore, any banana’s a good banana.
Yet, we don’t eat just any banana. Out of over a thousand banana varieties, the majority imported to the US and Europe, as well as that produced in China and over a quarter in India, are just one; the Cavendish. This one high-yielding variety, standardised in the 1960s, best suits international trade as it is more resilient to the effects of global travel. So 50 billion tonnes of genetically-identical Cavendish bananas are produced globally every year. That’s a problem: it means the whole lot is vulnerable.
Until the 1950s, almost all bananas consumed in the US and Europe were another small and tasty variety, the Gros Michel, grown throughout the Caribbean. While efficient to produce, the banana’s seeds were too small to plant, so all new plants had to be grown from the cut suckers of another. All bananas were therefore genetically identical, giving them no traits for resistance to a fast-spreading fungal disease. And so when Panama disease took hold, growers abandoned the Gros Michel for the Cavendish, which could be produced using similar infrastructure.
But the Cavendish is bred, cloned and grown in a similar way. Reproduced asexually, all the bananas could easily succumb as the Gros Michel did. It is dangerously susceptible to TR4, a newer strain of a pathogen closely related to the one that caused Panama disease. TR4 has started to spread across Asia and East Africa. It is now also threatening banana plantations in Central America. Countries like Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama and Belize, whose number one export item is the banana, have come to depend strongly on the success of the crop.
As ecologist Professor Rob Dunn explains in his book Never Out of Season, this challenge is much broader than the banana. Year-round demand for abundant crops has led to industrialised production of, and our reliance upon, the hardiest, best-tasting varieties. The streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time. But going forward, protecting biodiversity is the only way we can preserve this supply. 🍌
💡 How to sell good ideas: Malcolm Gladwell has put out a new book. The New Statesman features an elegant part-profile part-interview, noting that this prominent intellectual thinks ideas should be enjoyable and, as such, doesn’t mind if you disagree with him.
👎 The Evil List: Which tech companies are doing the most harm? Slate polled a range of journalists, scholars, advocates, and others who think critically about technology, asking them which tech companies most concerns them (by their own definition). The aggregate results are a top-thirty where downsides outweigh benefits.
🥁 Where the Music Business Is Going in 2020: the last decade have been tumultuous in the music industry, and Rolling Stone reckons the year ahead will be no different, from streaming to data, tech disruption in creation and performance, plus shifting ownership and power over rights and licensing.
☯️ The great paradox of our time: everything is both better and worse than ever before: In general terms, we’re better off than at any point in human history, but things have never been worse. The source of our progress has become the source of our downfall, and this presents a conundrum: things are too good for us to change it all, yet too bad for us to leave anything as it is.
📐 Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed: Ever wondered how we arrived at the forty-hour working week? The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in the 19th century. As technologies advanced, workers became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays, but it hasn’t.
👫 Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been: Back before Facebook became the de facto social network, collecting our data then pulling up the drawbridges, a project set out to create a decentralised an open social network, like how email has no overall control. But despite this, it never took off the way Facebook did; this article explores why.
Top banana: I eat a lot of bananas. I’m also pretty good at not eating them soon enough, which results in a soft, blackened mess. There’s lots of potential uses for overripe bananas, but better still it turns out if you wrap the storks in cling film, bananas last another four days. I have a difficult relationship with cling film, though. Wrapping a banana in all that single-use PVC feels like fighting fire with fireworks.
But then, is the use of single-use plastics worse than wasting food that was shipped 6,000 miles? I couldn’t do the arithmetic in my head so I went searching for answers. It turns out Professor Mike Berners-Lee, an expert in carbon footprinting, wrote the book called How Bad are Bananas?
In my search I fell straight down the rabbithole of banana distribution, including this thread on the banana capacity of container ships. Bless the Internet, and all who sail in it. But to my surprise, the carbon cost of a banana is really quite low: they grow in natural light rather than hothouses, they can be shipped rather than flown, and need barely any packaging. Monoculture remains an issue, as does the use of pesticides and deforestation to form plantations. But measured in carbon, it could be much worse. 🌱
Finally: You might imagine a disaster on the scale that has transpired lately in parts of Australia might have been handled differently. But the consequences of ignoring well-established climate science is equally saddening and maddening. Political economist Angus Hervey pulls no punches in A Burning Nation, Led By Cowards. 🇦🇺