“Yes, we have no bananas
We have-a no bananas today.
We’ve string beans, and onions
We have an old fashioned to-mah-to
A Long Island po-tah-to
But yes, we have no bananas.
We have no bananas today.”

 

That song, written in 1922, was about a Greek fruit and vegetable seller at New York docks whose English wasn’t perfect.   It was inspired by a shortage of bananas when the so-called Panama Disease wiped out the crop in Central America.   At that time plantations had opted for extreme monoculture cultivating only the Gros Michel variety which grew in dense bunches and had a thick peel making it easier to transport.   There are now about 1,000 varieties of bananas subdivided into 50 groups:  for cooking, desert, plantains, and cultivars that are genetically cloned and/or modified to get desirable features.

 

Crops having low genetic variation are more susceptible to environmental conditions, for example the potato blight that resulted in the Irish Famine.   The Irish Lumper was the potato variety grown at the time because it grew well in poor soil.   It wasn’t until 40 years later that scientists discovered the cure for potato blight, a solution of copper sulphate sprayed before the fungus took root.   New potato cultivars have been bred using resistant genes that originate from wild relatives that can resist blight and other pathogens.   The wild relatives may be native to South America.   New variants of pathogens arise, cures are reformulated, Met Eireann and BlightSpy websites warn of weather conditions favourable for blight.

 

Those were problems of the past but 40% of the people of Ireland think they are being harmed now by climate change.   If the periodic shortage of tomatoes and red peppers was not enough to worry about, I heard that there is a shortage of French mustard and Saffron.   Canada supplies about 80% of the mustard seed used to make French mustard but a drought slashed the harvest.   Now the French have to boost their production in Burgundy and Dijon.   Such a shortage has not happened for 50 years.

 

To meet the demand India intends to grow more mustard seed and less cumin seed.   Some people are substituting cumin seed for mustard seed which is leading to a shortage of cumin, especially with increased demand from China driving up prices.   Then there is the worry that cumin seeds grown in Turkey and Russia might not meet E.U. Standards in 2024.

 

As for saffron, it has been used for medicine, perfume, food flavouring and food colouring.   It is very expensive because only the stigmata and red pistils which form part of the female flower’s reproductive system is harvested and it must be done by hand.   The plant needs a dry climate and moderate temperature to flourish, like Iran has, which produces a 95% share of the global market.

 

Flowers remain vital to the brand image of French perfumes like Dior, though modern perfumes have some synthetic components.   With the thread of climate change looming perfumers are turning their attention to the soil and entering into years-long contracts with growers to lock-in many-years harvests from growers around the world.

 

People say they are worried about biodiversity loss, unpredictable seasons and the disturbance that could be caused to species that have coevolved together:  insects, birds, pollinators and their food sources and habitats.   They worry about invasive species but we have been adapting and modifying animals, plants and human beings for a long time, even genetically.   We have created plants hybrids and cultivars and grafted them on to old root stock.   We have transplanted human organs and done amazing things in the fields of medicine and science. 

 

We probably overstepped some extreme boundaries thinking we were making progress and now we need to take a step back.   We probably thought we were in charge of our destiny but Mother Nature is letting us know she has her hand on the controls.

 

What am I to do?   Instead of getting rid of the dandelions in the lawn I’ll admire their sacred geometry, sing “he loves me, he loves me not” as I pick off petals, and make a wish as the seeds blow away.

 

Note:  You can find Louis Prima’s version of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” on You Tube.