May 29, 2019
The blight threatening bananas
Banana specialists from around the world are arriving in Miami this week for the eighth International Banana Congress. A primary discussion point is Panama disease, a fungal infection that rots the fruit from the inside.
It’s been spreading for decades across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Growers have tried containing it, mostly without success.
Part of the problem is that cultivated bananas are a single variety, the Cavendish. Another, the Gros Michel, used to be similarly dominant, until a related fungus wiped it out in the 1950s.
Biodiversity would offer disease resistance. But industry supply chains prefer monocultures, which offer uniform growth patterns, harvest times, shipping resilience and ripening processes.
“If the banana industry sticks to a single breed that is susceptible to this incurable disease, they’re going to run into trouble,” said Dan Koeppel, who has written about the history of the banana and who also writes for Wirecutter, a product review website owned by The New York Times.
Scientists are studying the fungus and mapping its pathways, trying to keep Latin America from being next.
May 14, 2019
The straw
Around the world, limits are being imposed on plastics, which break into particles that end up permeating the oceans, the air, the earth and even our bodies.
One common target is the drinking straw.
In the U.S., hundreds of millions of straws are used daily. Seattle has banned them. In Los Angeles, if you want a straw, you have to ask for it. Many bars are switching to paper versions.
But humans and straws go way back. The Sumerian civilization (about 4,000 B.C.) in southern Mesopotamia used hollow reeds or golden tubes to sip beer, bypassing gunk left from fermentation.
In 19th-century America, an inventor, Marvin Stone, wrapped paper strips around a pencil, glued and waxed them, and patented his creation in 1888.
Forty years later, another inventor, Joseph Friedman, put a screw in a straw. Wrapping floss around the screw’s thread created small ridges that made the straw bendable, which proved helpful for hospital patients drinking from cups.
Only since the polymer boom of the 1960s have straws been made predominantly of plastic.
April 16, 2019
The environment vs. population growth
In smaller U.S. cities and rural areas, demographic decline is a painful reality. Hungary is worried about a declining population. So is Japan. Even China.
It’s an economic truism: Growing populations drive economies.
But in this era of climate change, is it wiser to have fewer people to house, feed and provide power for?
Globally, a smaller population would “make a difference, certainly,” said Joseph Chamie, a former U.N. population official. “Fewer people means fewer items consumed, and fewer resources used, so your carbon footprint would be less.”
But limiting population growth, he said, can’t solve the environmental problems caused by mass production and consumption.
And companies whose business models rely on constant growth have little incentive to change. More customers and more consumption mean more profits.
“We can try to maintain the quality of the environment,” Mr. Chamie said. “But we have to change our mind-set regarding how the economy moves.”
April 3, 2019
A Virginia newspaper
Political scandals engulfed the Virginia Statehouse months ago.
The Virginian-Pilot has been among the regional papers covering the scandals and their aftermath closely. It was the first to confirm a report that Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page included a photograph of one man in blackface with another in a Ku Klux Klan robe.
The Pilot is the product of local newspaper mergers that began just after the Civil War. It first published under its current name in 1898, and was acquired by Tronc, the former Tribune Co., in 2018. (The company has since changed its name to Tribune Publishing.) Based in southeastern Virginia, The Pilot’s coverage bleeds into North Carolina.
The Pilot earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for an editorial on the evils of lynching; another in 1960 for editorials on officials’ stonewalling of school integration; and a third in 1985 for reporting on local corruption.
Last year, The Pilot was a finalist for the Pulitzer in investigative reporting, for documenting injustices in Virginia’s parole system. Who knows what 2019 might bring?
March 7, 2019
The art of preservation
If you’re about to open a can of something tasty, thank the French.
In the late 1700s, Napoleon was on the move, invading Italy, Austria and Egypt. Feeding his enormous armies was a problem — he needed a way to keep food from spoiling.
A confectioner, Nicolas Appert, spent years coming up with a successful process. He placed fruits, vegetables and meats in glass bottles, corked and wired them, then boiled the bottles for hours. He didn’t know he was killing microbes — he just knew that the more heat and less air, the better.
By 1810, Napoleon’s government handed him a 12,000-franc prize and required him to publish a book, with the catchy title “The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years.”
Glass, unfortunately, breaks. It was the British who developed the tin can.
March 5, 2019
A Mardi Gras tradition
King cake is no ordinary cake. The circular pastry shines with stripes of sugared New Orleans Carnival colors: purple for justice, gold for power and green for faith.
It’s stuffed with fruit and pecans — and a plastic baby that brings luck to the finder (along with the responsibility of providing the next year’s cake).
The notion of embedding an object in cake dates from at least the Roman Empire. For Saturnalia, a predecessor of Christmas, it was a fava bean. Whoever received the slice containing the bean ruled the day.
But the Romans also associated fava beans with death. That might be because of a genetic disorder, most common in the Mediterranean, that creates an often lethal bean allergy.
So perhaps eating a cake with a fava bean was a morbid joke, a moment on the edge, or what could be thought of as letting the good times roll.
January 31, 2019
The term “polar vortex”
The word “vortex,” derived from the Latin for “to turn,” has been in use since at least the 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s cited in centuries-old scientific theoriesto mean a swirl of something around a central axis.
The first pairing of “polar” and “vortex” is widely credited to an article published in 1853, in a magazine that Charles Dickens edited. The author, John Capper, was a merchant and journalist who lived in what’s now Sri Lanka.
His article, “Air Maps,” was a somewhat florid account of the state of the relatively new science regarding wind, a crucial factor for nautical travel and trade in the era before marine engines.
The patterns of the Earth’s major winds could be tracked, Capper wrote, and one “whirled about the pole in a continued circular gale: at last, reaching the great polar vortex.”
These days, we know the polar vortex as those swirling winds breaking out of the polar region, bringing frigid temperatures south.