Yes, We Have New Bananas

Shopping isn’t one of those things that I stick at the top of my “Best Ever, Unreal Things To Do” list. Grocery shopping actually depresses me. Not just because of the boredom and the queues, but also because I am an unrepentant snob and the place where we do our grocery shopping is filled with the most heinous slobs, losers, idiots and just plain smelly people. They like to go down the aisles two abreast and act all surprised when you want to get past them as they stare gormlessly at a jar of pickled herrings as though it is the single most interesting artefact to have dropped out of the sky.

As a consequence, I don’t go shopping every day. But this has led to a complication: and so, a request to geneticists and farmers.

At a recent visit to the doctor, it transpired that I have been critically short on potassium. You need to have a certain amount in your blood to stop you from falling over, and I had almost none. So the doctor said to me, “Bananas.” Because I am tired of nearly falling over, I have heeded his advice and got on a narny binge. But it’s not easy. As you  know by now, I like everything to be no harder than it has to be and bananas are not helping.

The window of edibility due to ripeness on your commercially produced banana is 20 minutes long, arriving at approximately 3.30 in the morning. I am compelled to buy bunches of bananas because I don’t want to go to the shops every day to buy one, lonely, curved, yellow piece of fruit. But that leaves you with most of the bunch being not ripe enough, or too ripe during its stay in the house.

What I want Monsanto to develop, if they really want to buy my loyalty to their GM crops, is bunches of bananas that ripen sequentially, not simultaneously.

How hard can it be?