A group of human beings can not truly be described as civilized until they ferment. Look at beer, cheese, bread and even, yes, pickled cucumbers.

For some of us, pickles are a low carb and healthy snack. Bananas can be quite detrimental to diabetics since they are high carb and high GI.

On top of that, pickles can be made with almost any vegetable using little more than salt, a selection of herbs and vinegar, which is the most easily obtainable mild acid and can be produced by rice, beer, apples, grapes, coconuts and most fruit, among other ingredients.

Almost all bananas that we eat are sterile, genetic clones of an original Dwarf Cavendish banana cultivar that can be traced back to hothouse of Bill "Big Yellow" Cavendish back in the early 1800s. Since bananas are cloned, they do not evolve disease resistances and the Cavendish could possible be decimated across the globe by a strain of Panama disease. This happened to the Cavendish's predecessor, the Gros Michel, the most popular banana before being utterly destroyed by disease. That Cavendish you love? It was a second rate shoe-in to keep the banana industry from going bankrupt after all of the Big Mikes got sick.

So, while you wrap your bananas in bacon and dream of a brighter tomorrow, realize that a single illness could wipe away the banana as we know it. Some other strain would have to take its place and it would look and taste different. The banana may live, for now, but it's walking a fragile and tenuous balancing act between popular breakfast food and a decimated footnote in the compost heap of culinary history. The banana will die, oh yes, but not due to /r/pickle. It will die because of our own homogenized taste and because of the hubris of the common banana farmer who believed a cloned cultivar could succeed for so long - and for not learning from our previous bananatastrophes.

Meanwhile, I will sit, nibbling on a variety of pickled veggies (including cucumbers). I may even try creating a new dish like bacon-wrapped deep fried pickle chips this weekend.

Edit: pickle instead of pickles