In describing Henry Rollins, the tendency is to try to squeeze as many labels as possible into a single sentence. “Rollins is many things,” says the Washington Post, “diatribist, confessor, provocateur, humorist, even motivational speaker…his is an enthusiastic and engaging chatter.” Entertainment Weekly’s list includes “Punk-rock icon. Spoken word poet. Actor. Author. DJ. Is there anything this guy can’t do?” TV Guide has more concisely called him a “Renaissance Man”—but if Henry Rollins could be reduced to a single word, that word would undoubtedly be “workaholic.”
For better than a quarter century, Rollins has toured the world as a spoken word artist, as frontman for both Rollins Band and Black Flag and—without a microphone—as a solitary traveler with insatiable curiosity bypassing the resorts in favor of places like Siberia, Senegal, Burma and Bangladesh.
When he’s not living out of a backpack, Rollins is constantly at work as an actor, radio DJ, author of more than 25 books and running his publishing company and record label 2.13.61. Henry currently hosts a weekly radio show on L.A.’s renowned NPR affiliate KCRW, and is a regular columnist for LA Weekly and Rolling Stone Australia. Henry has also shared his topical rants and played thoughtful interviewer as host of The Henry Rollins Show, and mixed performance and documentary in a string of Uncut specials filmed around the globe. Now, in 10 Things, Henry brings his unbridled passion for history to H2, searching for the stories and facts you don’t know about America’s extraordinary past.
That banana you ate this morning was the perfect banana, even if you didn’t realize it.
Tough enough to survive a trip often covering many thousands of miles, it cost well less than a dollar and yet tasted (we hope) delicious. The tree that produced it bore lots of the fruit, but wasn’t so tall that it would tip over during hurricane season. When the banana turned yellow, you knew it was ripe.
But Cavendish, the best-selling commercial banana worldwide and in the U.S., is also facing a threat that could spell its demise — for the very reasons that put it at No. 1.
’Consumers are kind of addicted to the Cavendish banana. That’s what they see the banana as.’
The problem is an easily spread soil fungus called Panama disease that can’t be treated with pesticides. When it’s appeared in banana-growing regions such as Southeast Asia, the fungus has rendered agricultural regions completely barren.
Also called Fusarium wilt and Tropical race 4, it hasn’t yet appeared in Latin America, the main exporter of bananas to the U.S., but it’s only a matter of time, experts say.
So much so that a meeting of the International Banana Congress this week — at which all of Thursday’s programming focused on the disease — was changed to take place in Miami, because of concerns about attendees spreading fungus-ridden soil in Costa Rica.
The change, which CNN reported Wednesday, was intended to make “a statement,” said Jorge Sauma, the chief executive of Costa Rica’s National Banana Corporation (CORBANA), the organizer of the congress.
Should the disease cross the Atlantic Ocean, it won’t quite mean bananapocalypse. But it will mean more expensive bananas in the short term, Sauma said, and a very different banana in the future.
“Are bananas going to go extinct? Not going to happen,” said Randy Ploetz, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Florida. “But this thing is really moving rapidly,” and there’s no other easily exported banana waiting in the wings.”
Second time around
Why is Panama disease so potent? Blame a lack of diversity in the banana crop.
Bananas are a crop that gets sick easily. That’s exacerbated by the “monoculture” of Cavendish bananas, said Dan Koeppel, a journalist and author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.”
Since they don’t have seeds — what appear to be seeds at the core of the fruit in fact are vestigial and can’t sprout — our bananas don’t reproduce sexually, and thus lack genetic variation. Or, as Koeppel puts it, you “put all your bananas in one basket.”
This isn’t the first time the banana has faced a threat of this kind.
The first commercial banana, the Gros Michel, is what first taught Americans to love the fruit when it was brought here in the late 19th century. It’s a “way better banana than Cavendish,” said Koeppel, because its thicker peel made it easy to ship, but it also tasted better and ripened at a slower pace.
But “Cavendish did one thing really well: It didn’t get Panama disease,” he added.
Until now.
What’s next?
Producers are working to stave off the disease, but most agree the solution is a better banana.
Yet it’s not as easy as picking another of the thousand varieties of banana, which range widely in color and size.
Why? Think back to all the specifications a commercially exported banana needs to fit. New types of bananas require “major investments in research and development,” explains a November 2015 research paper in PLoS.
We’re already decades behind, Koeppel said: “The banana industry hasn’t done decades of study. They haven’t really started.”
The University of Florida’s Ploetz agreed, though he said it’ll be more like five to 10 years before there’s a suitable replacement commercial banana.
Big banana companies used to play big roles in research, but today they act as more of a middleman, focused on profit margins, he said.
Banana manufacturers — the major players include Chiquita Brands International Inc., Dole Food Company Inc. and Fresh Del Monte Produce FDP, +0.69% — don’t entirely agree.
Panama disease hasn’t yet affected farms in Latin America, and “there is no reason to believe that the situation could change in the immediate future,” said Christine Cannella, investor relations officer at Del Monte.
“However, Del Monte takes this potential threat very seriously,” she said, and so it’s making changes “to prevent entry of potentially contaminated material to farms, container yards and other banana related facilities. Also, significant resources are being dedicated for research aimed at identifying a long-term solution to this situation.”
Even if most experts have concluded that Panama disease is inevitable, Sauma is positive about the banana’s future.
Compared with 50 or 60 years ago, “we have now molecular biology — the sequence of the genome of this particular fungus is already done. We have now biological control, and we have the Internet,” he said. “We are really positive we can find a solution.”
The bananas of tomorrow
It remains possible we can have our Cavendish bananas and eat them, too. Two potentially Panama disease–resistant varieties are being evaluated, Sauna said.
But one of those, a genetically modified variant from Australia, raises other questions about consumer acceptance, Ploetz said, adding that a non-GMO disease-resistant banana is at least a decade away.
Another option is bringing more exotic types of bananas to the U.S., assuming consumers would be willing to pay more for the fruit and weather the learning curve.
But it would require a fundamental realignment in banana thinking, readjusting to eating a banana that’s green when ripe, for example.
“Consumers are kind of addicted to the Cavendish banana,” Ploetz said. “That’s what they see the banana as.”
