Society's Believe It or Not

Figure 1

I have my qualms with the banana. It's too soft for my liking, and the taste is, at best, unique. Sometimes, I'd eat four bananas in a day, while for the next two months I wouldn't touch one. Is it even a fruit? It doesn't have any seeds to produce other banana-giving life. This is why I have trust issues. Recently, I found out the yellow fruit we call the banana, that long, soft byproduct of some tree, isn't even real. 

As seen in Figure 1, this is a wild banana. It's smaller and, somehow, in some unnatural way,  contains seeds to continue the banana bloodline. Only through human intervention, the domestication of the fruit eight thousand years ago, that thing sitting on our counter is not of Nature. We've neutered the banana, ridding its seeds for convenience. It's ironic that we advertise the all-natural banana as something untouched by the pesticides we've created, as if one could walk into the tropics and pick a pure, luscious—seedless—banana. Human-kind has broken Nature's beauty, mangling it into its own image.

I can relate to Chet Raymo's reaction to genetic engineering: it does give a "sense of foreboding" (9). The banana is proof that "a gene is potentially immortal" (10), that there should be something to be uneasy about, and impossible to revert back to purity. We see the wild banana above as odd, a hoax; we are accustomed to the unreal than the natural. The world that I live in is ultimately a synthetic one, a "spooky Frankensteinian quality" (10), unsure what is wild or some patched-up gene experiment. Even for the "unconquerable" (1) Okefenokee Swamp, we can't be certain if this swamp has been spotless of human hands.

It is as Raymo warns: "The unexamined quest for knowledge is hemmed with peril" (11). Step one was the banana, but years from now, who knows what else (flying pigs, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.) we will see as Nature's picture.