History of Canned Bananas
History of CANNED BANANAS
The Artist:
James F. Prucey was a budding painter when he moved from Florida to NYC to study Art at the Art Institute of New York in the 80’s. As a student, he focused on oils, water colors and sculpting, opened many a show and was the recipient of several accolades. Over the years however, he put down the brush and picked up the serving tray as so many fine young artists do to survive in the Big Apple.
A Math whiz and appreciator, Prucey spent years in the trenches with numbers, juggling ideas of a future in the stock market, business and the like. But this just wouldn’t do. Ultimately, Prucey had to come up with a plan that would involve his love for the art world, computer design and mathematics all at once to feed his creative spirit.
In a quiet room in Washington Heights, he spent days and weeks experimenting with new art forms, not the least of which were his “Sudoku paintings” based on his favorite puzzle game. It was out of these very [paintings and collages that Prucey developed his idea for RUBOKU - which would be the first game in CANNED BANANAS arsenal and the catalyst for all that was and is to come!
The Name:
It all began one day after tuning in to a radio show about the future of Bananas. Dan Koppel says it best: “The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction. For scientists, the battle to resuscitate the world’s favorite fruit has begun—a race against time that just may be too late to win!” (http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-06/can-fruit-be-saved)
As a banana fan of the highest order, Prucey did some research on the so called coming extinction of the banana finding a myriad of information on the Internet and beyond!
“A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish (which is what Americana’s consume today), the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest. The malady, which attacks the leaves, is in the same category as Dutch Elm disease. It appeared first in Suriname, then plowed through the Car- ibbean, finally reaching Honduras in the 1920s. (The country was then the world’s largest banana producer; today it ranks third, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica.)” And…
“A global effort is now under way to save the fruit-an effort defined by two opposing visions of how best to address the looming crisis. On one side are traditional banana growers, like Aguilar, who raise experimental breeds in the fields, trying to create a replacement plant that looks and tastes so similar to the Cavendish that consumers won’t notice the difference. On the other side are bio engineers like Rony Swennen, who, armed with a largely decoded banana genome, are manipulating the plant’s chromosomes, sometimes crossing them with DNA from other species, with the goal of inventing a tougher Cavendish that will resist Panama disease and other ailments.”
We at Canned Bananas urge you to study this issue further as it is very real and very near. The “perfect fruit” just may slip through our fingers.
