The Last of Its Kind

Every banana you have ever eaten was, in a real sense, the same banana. Not the same kind — nearly the same individual, copied. The fruit in your bowl has no seeds, which means it cannot breed. Every plant is a cutting of another plant, an unbroken chain of clones reaching back to a single original. You have spent your life eating one organism, propagated without end.

That makes the banana eerily fragile. A field of clones is genetically identical, so a disease that can kill one can kill all of them, everywhere, at once. It has happened. The banana your grandparents ate was a different variety — the Gros Michel, remembered as richer — and within the last century a fungus swept the world's plantations and wiped it out as a crop. Industry replaced it with the one you know, the Cavendish, chosen because it shrugged off that disease.

Now a new strain of the same fungus is moving through the plantations, and the Cavendish has no answer. The banana you ate this week may not outlast you.

You are eating a clone of a clone, on borrowed time, exactly like the one before it.

And if our food is this fragile — what else have we quietly bet everything on?