It seems that the common household banana is potentially heading for disaster. Apparently a fungus has been working its way through the crops of Malaysia and is threatening crops world-wide. A key part of the problem is that our current banana variety, the Cavendish, is not able to reproduce on its own, to grow a new banana plant you take a shoot off the plant itself because the bananas themselves are seedless (a pic of a seeded banana, for comparison). Further complications are that it is possible the fungus will spread to other varieties, including one used in Africa as a staple, which where my concern comes in - this is setting up to be very much a repetition of the mid 1800's Irish famine which caused the deaths of millions of people. :,-(