Codling Moths, Catalina and Other Calamities
We had three fruit trees in the back garden of my childhood home. One was a plum tree, and the other two were apple trees, including a Cox’s Orange Pippin. It was hard to accept waiting for the fruit to ripen, especially when I looked over at the apple trees. As the apples grew, they looked increasingly tempting. Usually greed overtook patience, and I’d pull one off. My mother had told me I would know if the fruit was ripe, because it would come away easily. Huh. Yank, and munch, and … another bitter tasting fruit! Mum would scold me, and I would try to wait a little longer, knowing I was being watched from the kitchen window. But boys of my age knew what to do: we went scrumping. [i] Scrumping sounds better than stealing, but it was stealing fruit from a nearby garden, hopping over a fence or reaching down from an overhanging branch.
Whether scrumped or legally obtained, munching an apple in those days did have some risks. If you didn’t look carefully, an enthusiastic bite might include taking in at least part of a maggot hiding inside the fruit. Alas, I must have eaten a few over the years! Of course, if I looked carefully, I would have seen the evidence of a maggot attack, as the entry hole would be covered with some sticky bits of dried waste. Those maggots were actually caterpillars, the larval stage of the Codling Moth, (Cydia pomonella). In the US, the equivalent pest is the larva of a variety of the fruit fly, the apple maggot (Rhagoletis pomonella), also known as the railroad worm. [ii] The maggots didn’t have a noticeable taste, but all us schoolkids agreed, they were horrible!
From the 1970’s onwards, apple production became big business, and out of the 2,000 or so varieties that are known, the focus was on round, colourful, soft yet still slightly crisp apples, if somewhat tasteless compared to past examples. In a supermarket you will see Red and Golden Delicious, Fuji and Gala, Braeburn, Honeycrisp, McIntosh and Pink Lady, and that old standby, Granny Smith for cooking. Cox’s Orange Pippins almost disappeared, as they were frequently mis-shapen and unsuited to the demands of supermarket uniformity. However, in the last decade or so, some of those once popular but almost vanished varieties have been making a comeback, especially with a push from organic growers. Whatever the variety, in the largely anodyne world of the apple today, I doubt many (if any) people now chomp on a maggot.
There is an apple in front of me right now, as I am typing. This is the stylised apple of Apple, the image of a Golden Delicious, I would guess, with a nice chunk removed on one side. I haven’t always been an Apple user: my life with word processing began with Wang terminals and WordPerfect, and from there I moved quickly on to the IBM personal computer (the XT was the first I used, back in 1984), and soon I was living with the DOS operating system and the slow invasion of Microsoft with MS-DOS, then Word. For the next 25 years I was a devoted IBM-clone user, and Microsoft Office held my work tools, especially Word and PowerPoint.
Arriving in the US ten years ago, we went off to a big box store, Best Buy, to buy a computer for home. I’m not certain what we intended as we walked in, but two hours later we walked out total ‘Appled’ with a Mac, a MacBook, and an iPad. We held on to our mobiles, two Samsung flip phones, but one was soon replaced by an iPhone. I had retained my Australian iPhone to use when travelling overseas, but I continued to use my Samsung in the USA for several years. Now we have two Macs, a MacBook, three iPads, and three iPhones.
The transition to Apple was easier than I had anticipated. After some minor mishaps, everything worked perfectly and seamlessly between devices. The screen on the Mac was a delight, making my photographs look positively professional. The current background is a Red-Shouldered Hawk standing on a branch in our garden, the boughs glistening with raindrops. I stuck with Firefox as my browser for years, but slowly, almost unnoticeably, I drifted over to Safari. I’ve resisted the Apple alternatives for word processing, presentations and spreadsheets: perhaps it’s habit, but I still like ubiquitous Word, PowerPoint and Excel. I loaded some of my favourite music into iTunes. I tried out iBooks (now just Books) and slowly built up a small library on my iPad for travel. I don’t know how, but now there are 274 books in that library! Yup, totally Appled.
Was I entranced by style and design? A little bit. Ease of use, and ability to transfer between devices? Quite a lot. Whatever the initial reason, once I was in, I was in: today, I find it hard to remember IBM clones, and even harder to imagine how I would work using them once more. It’s silly, I know, and, if I transitioned back, in no time at all it would be just as easy as it used to be. The little things would be annoying: where is the button to close something? It’s not where it should be. To be honest, I spend the majority of my computer time using Word, and apart from minor screen layout issues, it would be the same on most systems.
There’s more to this story, of course, and that has to do with changes over time. I was disappointed when Apple decided to get rid of the iBooks bookcase, so now book covers ‘float’ unattached in rows on the screen. I was disappointed to lose the CD/DVD read and write option when I got a newer Mac. I wish the built in camera in the Mac had the ability to zoom in and out. On the other hand, I am delighted I no longer have to replace batteries in the mouse and keyboard. Next up, I am thinking of getting some wireless (Bluetooth) headphones.
Some other changes are rather more than minor disappointments. I have to pay a yearly fee to use Microsoft Office, and each version is getting bigger and bigger in terms of disk space, and bigger and bigger in terms of options. I would love Microsoft to offer a simple Word package, Microsoft Light. There are so many functions I never use, and never will. The other is deciding what to do about using cloud-based storage. I managed to avoid it for a long time, but I store my photographs on the Mac, and now the collection has grown to the point where some have been offloaded to the cloud. As Trump the Chump remarked the other day, it is what it is.
Now to the frustrations. The equivalent of eating half a maggot in the world of apples as a fruit are upgrades in the world of Apple as a system. I know upgrades address malfunctions and potential virus threats. Good. But there are also wider system upgrades, and to date I’ve gone along with them. As I am typing, I am using macOS Catalina. Within that version, I get a correction or enhancement every two weeks or so. On average, each requires the system to shut down, new software downloaded, and then I wait while the new system replaces the old one. It can take 2 hours, and, almost without fail, another 1-3 hours to sort out any minor problems the process creates. I feel I’m teetering on the edge of disaster, while my normally equable self becomes more like a grumpy curmudgeon. Not good for my temper, and not good for my health.
It’s not just Apple. I get regular updates from Microsoft. I get regular updates on the various ‘apps’ I use (not that I have many). I would guess that every other day there is something being upgraded, improved, additionally protected. When I am getting especially niggled, I can foresee a future in which I’m allowed a maximum of 2-3 hours work time, while the rest of the day is devoted to ‘fixes’. Apples and Apple, both ever changing elements of the world we live in.
Sixty years ago, I could take an apple off the tree (if my mother wasn’t watching), possibly check for any obvious infestation, and then enjoy the fresh, rich and snappy taste of a misshapen but delicious Cox’s Orange Pippin. Small risk, high flavour. I don’t eat many apples now. The closest with any real taste seems to be Fuji (I think). Apples today are big and flavourless, but I haven’t bitten in to a maggot in years! That seems to be the way of most fruits, bags of largely tasteless coloured water. Bananas are good, and so are in-season cherries, raspberries, and varieties of plum. In my local supermarket there is an area for organic fruits and vegetables. I thought they were all organic? Oh, never mind. In most cases, the organic version is clearly better than the ‘inorganic’ version, some especially tasty, like organic heirloom tomatoes.
How did we get here? Careful varietal manipulation, and even some genetic modifications, have resulted in almost perfect fruit (in terms of consistent shape, size and colour). At the same time, calamity lurks. An outbreak of some pest or other can decimate crops, and a fruit or vegetable can disappear off the shelves for days, even weeks. Hardworking bugs eye over acres of tempting red apples and await the next random chromosomal alteration that will make them impervious to protective treatments, and then we’ll find ourselves eating maggots for tea!
It’s time to talk about bananas, because the banana illustrates the risks in this. [iii] The banana story begins many years ago. There are many kinds of banana in the world, but until the second half of the 20th century, the dominant variety was the Gros Michel, tastier and more difficult to bruise than any of the others. Then, in the middle of the 1950s, the crop was attacked by a strain of Panama disease, also known as banana wilt, an easily spread, noxious, soil-dwelling fungus. Desperate for a solution, the world’s banana farmers turned to another variety, the Cavendish. The Cavendish was resistant to the disease and it met other market needs: it could stay green for several weeks after being harvested (ideal for shipping to Europe), it was prolific, and it looked good in stores. Equally important, there was no choice! Multinational fruit companies had no other disease-resistant variety available that could be introduced quickly for mass production.
The switched worked. As the Gros Michel was ravaged by disease, the Cavendish banana took over. Today, almost the entire banana supply chain is set up around that variety. However, like any fruit, it remains at risk. Years ago scientists warned the world’s largest banana exporters Panama Disease could return, with a variant that could hit the Cavendish hard, possibly within 10 to 30 years. Late last year Colombia confirmed Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a strain of Panama disease, had appeared on Cavendish banana farms and the country declared a national state of emergency. Now the same disease is appearing in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Guatemala.
There’s a name for this situation: monoculture, the practice of concentrating on just one variety of a product. Monoculture has its benefits. Standardisation largely eliminates the need for new production and harvesting processes, as everything is established and familiar to users. On the other hand, as the banana story makes clear, in a monoculture every producer is prone to the same attack. If someone or something figures out how to affect one crop, the entire system is put at risk. In the case of bananas, if they’re under threat from a single disease, the fungus may be easily spread, from truck tyres or workers’ boots: it’s hard to contain. As most banana farmers are growing the Cavendish variety, their crops are all vulnerable to this new infection.
“The story of the banana is really the story of modern agriculture exemplified in a single fruit,” says Daniel Bebber, who leads the BananaEx research group at the UK’s University of Exeter. “It has all of the ingredients of equitability and sustainability issues, disease pressure, and climate change impact all in one. It’s a very good lesson for us.” He believes the lesson is simple: “A lot of people would agree that we need to move to a more diverse, more sustainable system for bananas and agriculture in general,” says Bebber, “where we don’t put all our hope into a single, genetically identical crop.” [iv] Monocultures are major calamities in waiting.
The banana story is a lesson for more than plants. There are other ‘monocultures’, like Microsoft Windows and Apple OS systems in the computer world. All those computers using Windows, for example, offer a huge, enticing crop: all it takes is for a virus to worm its way in, and it can maim and destroy to its heart’s content! Disastrous! Indeed, many software attacks resemble Panama disease’s threat to bananas; uniform software systems offer uniform vulnerabilities. Back in 1988, the Morris Worm infected an estimated 10% of all computers on the Internet in just 24 hours; more recently, the 2016 Mirai Botnet, which allowed an outside party to remotely control a network of devices, brought down Twitter, Netflix, CNN and more.
“Monocultures are dangerous in almost every facet of life,” according Fred B. Schneider, a cybersecurity expert at Cornell University. “With people, of course, populations are stronger and more disease-resistant if there’s more genetic diversity. And with transportation, it’s more effective to have several different options—when a train line is shut down, if you have other choices at your disposal, like a car or another form of transit, you won’t be stuck.” [v] Schneider points out that software monocultures are common because, without them, using your computer would be a lot harder. Standard configuration settings, for example, make it easy to help users who may not be experts in the technology to set up and implement their software. I’m a good example: wherever I go I assume Windows is available for presentations or notes. Uniformity for ease of use means we end up with common systems vulnerable to nasty viruses. Software engineers today are learning from agriculture. If banana growers are seeking crop diversity, so program developers are introducing diversity into systems. Microsoft has done this in Windows by randomizing the internal locations where important pieces of system data are stored.
The pressure to introduce uniform, easily managed monocultures are immense, as they reduce costs, simplify processes, and increase profits. By avoiding expensive complexity and diversity, danger lurks just around the corner. The coronavirus targets humans’ common biochemical pathways, malicious worms attack computers and networks, and pests destroy food varieties. Smart computer systems, like many banana varieties, can help. So can robust human immune systems. Recent research shows over-protected children tend to have weaker germ resistance, and that means … gosh, that maybe eating dirt and a few maggots can be beneficial!
[i] Scrumping comes from ‘scrump’, an old word for a withered apple, not scrumptious, as I would have guessed!
[ii] Notice how both these species names include ‘Pom’? Those French get everywhere!
[iii] Much of this draws on Anna Kambhampaty’s article at https://time.com/5730790/banana-panama-disease/
[iv] Cited by Kambhampaty, op cit
[v] Ibid
