Enjoy those banana splits while you can because in 10 years the banana may be no more… or at least may never be the same.

In this Guardian Unlimited article, science correspondent James Meek discusses the potential plight of the yellow fruit in the face of potentially deadly diseases.

Like its fellow fruit the apple, the bananas you buy from the grocery store are a particular genetic mutant of wild bananas discovered by farmers and grown from cuttings, essentially making them something like a clone of the original mutant.

Two fungi, Panama disease and Sigatoka, are threatening the current major variety, the Cavendish. (This variety was more resistant than the earlier Gros Michel, which succumbed to Panama disease in the 1950s.) Because the repeated cuttings have prevented the bananas from reproducing sexually and therefore changing up their genes, they are less resistant to pests.

Other monocultured crops, from grains to cows (which I recently mentioned in an article on animal cloning), can have this problem, so the banana may not be the only food we have to worry about disappearing in the future…