By Sandra Reyes, Executive Director, Americans for Persimmon Awareness. Founded 2019.
We have been patient.
We have submitted our findings through the appropriate channels. We have attended the meetings. We have sat at the folding table in the produce section with pamphlets that nobody took. We have watched the banana's market share climb every single year while we smiled and said nothing because we were told that was the professional approach.
We are done being professional.
We are buying this space because the appropriate channels have not worked, and because what we are about to tell you is something the banana industry has spent considerable resources making sure you never thought too hard about.
Start with what the banana actually is.
Every banana you have ever eaten is genetically identical to every other banana. Not similar. Not the same variety. The exact same organism, reproduced by sending shoots from its own root structure, incapable of sexual reproduction, incapable of variation, incapable of change. The banana you ate this morning was the same banana your grandmother ate. It is the same banana Jeff eats. It is the same banana the stranger on your train eats, the one across the country eats, the one on the other side of the world eats. There is one banana. There has always been only one banana. It comes in billions of identical copies and it has never once been yours specifically.
We want you to sit with that.
You built a morning around it. You reached for it without thinking, which is exactly what the banana wants, a relationship so automatic you stop questioning it entirely. You thought the routine meant something. You thought your loyalty meant something. The banana does not know your name. The banana cannot know your name. The banana is a sterile clone that has not evolved since the Cavendish variety replaced the Gros Michel in the 1950s following a fungal collapse that the banana did not survive through resilience or adaptation but through human intervention that the banana has never once acknowledged or thanked anyone for.
The banana was saved. It has spent the subsequent seventy years acting like that never happened.
And here is the part we need you to hear: the banana is dying again. There is another fungus. Tropical Race 4. It has been spreading since the 1990s and it will eventually do to the Cavendish what Panama disease did to the Gros Michel, which is finish it completely. The banana industry knows this. Researchers know this. We have known this for thirty years.
The banana has not told you.
You have been deepening a commitment to something that is quietly, unhurriedly, already on its way out, and it has chosen to spend that time on grocery store endcaps and smoothie menus rather than having an honest conversation with you about what is coming. That is not a relationship. That is someone running out the clock.
We understand this is not comfortable. We are not raising it to cause pain. We are raising it because you are an adult who deserves accurate information about what you are choosing to eat every morning, and because there is something else we need you to consider.
Think about the last time you saw Jeff's banana.
You recognized it immediately. Of course you did. It was indistinguishable from yours because it was yours, same genetics, same structure, same blank indifference to either of you specifically. You thought you had something the banana was giving only to you. Jeff thought the same thing. You were both wrong in exactly the same way at exactly the same time, which is perhaps the most clarifying thing the banana has ever accidentally communicated.
It gave you nothing it wasn't giving everyone.
Now. We need to tell you about the persimmon.
The persimmon has been in your produce section this whole time. Every week. Sitting there. You have walked past it. You have perhaps looked at it briefly and thought, I don't know what that is, and moved on, which is a completely understandable response and also exactly the kind of reaction the banana's decades of shelf dominance has trained you to have toward anything that requires a moment of consideration.
The persimmon requires a moment of consideration. This is not a flaw.
Each persimmon grows from a specific tree in a specific place and it carries something of that place with it. They are not identical. They are not interchangeable. The persimmon from one orchard tastes different from the persimmon from another, which means when you eat one you are eating something that came from somewhere real, tended by someone specific, grown in particular soil. It has a provenance. It has a location on a map you could point to.
The persimmon also has standards. If you eat an unripe one, your mouth will let you know immediately. The tannins will seize everything. You will not be able to eat it. The persimmon is telling you something: you moved too fast, you didn't pay attention, you need to slow down and learn something before you can have this. The banana has never once asked anything of you. The banana requires nothing from you. The banana will let anyone have it at any stage of ripeness and feel nothing either way.
We are not saying the persimmon is perfect. We are saying the persimmon is real. We are saying it has been there, and it has been ignored, and it deserves better than that, and frankly so do you.
Americans for Persimmon Awareness has maintained a presence on Teen Google since March. Teen Google will deliver it to you when Teen Google determines the time is appropriate. We cannot control that. What we can control is being here, in this space, asking you directly:
The next time you are in the produce section, stop.
Look at the persimmon. It has been there the whole time.
It's still there.
Americans for Persimmon Awareness is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Sandra Reyes, Executive Director. We can be reached by mail. We check it on Thursdays. We have been doing this since 2019 and we are not stopping.