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Envoy: Plight of the Banana Licuado (Gastronomic Notes from Abroad) A perennial favorite among the Argentine grammar school set, the licuado is a simple drink: milk, blenderized fruit – usually banana – and sugar. The licuado is not a milkshake – it can and indeed often is made with water instead of milk; and unlike its more famous American cousin, its chief objective is not to achieve the maximum thickness machinely possible. Yes, the licuado can be very thin indeed. But what expert banana licuado makers have discovered is that thinness carries with it its own virtues: namely, and chiefly, taste. Frothy and light, a small sip settles over the tongue like late fall frost, blanketing the palate with the explosive, concentrated taste of the fruit selected. Like beef, or chocolate cake, it is both haute cuisine fodder and a regular roadside diner staple, and mostly the difference lies in presentation and portion size: are you sipping it from a slender cylindrical Chihuly-worthy glass, or is it dripping down both sides of an enormous plastic beer stein the size of your neighbor’s kiddie pool? Longtime devotees will have had ample opportunity to try both; more recent converts – university students from abroad, for example – such as myself tend to throw themselves stomachlong into a potentially (and paradoxically) salutary dietary game of catch-up, in which the banana licuado replaces the traditional Argentine food staple, morbidly rare beef, in a direct kilo-for-kilo exchange. No small wonder, then, that the more pragmatic issues of supply (versus traditional aesthetic and gastronomic ones) suddenly become chief among topics as food for thought. I’ve heard rumblings and rumors of the impending extinction of the banana as we know it (Musa family, Cavendish type): a single disease threatens to wipe out completely the world’s genetically homogenous commercial banana populations — and while this piece of alarmist apocalyptica had never particularly worried me before, I now find myself thinking about it earnestly, circling back round to it again and again like a dog worrying a bone. I think about it on the bus: is there no way agricultural scientists can splice together a more resilient banana genome? Surely there has got to be a way to save this thing — I’m imagining government-sponsored breeding programs, senior internship projects at the big agricultural universities, an agronomic X Prize put up as a reward for the person who invents the hardiest and tastiest new strain of banana. The winner will be an underdog twelve-year-old amateur horticulturalist, the proud owner of a light microscope given to him for Christmas that he keeps in his basement; the three shrubby banana plants in his backyard will win out over thousands of acres of microclimatized greenhouses in Brazil. Newspaper reporters love him for his chubby cheeks and his cheeky interviews, and the banana companies exult over the fact that everything turned out better than they could have hoped: bananas are back on the front page of the New York Times, and the news is good. I think about it in the shower, this time in a more bilious and melancholic mood: if the strain of banana that we eat today is, by all accounts, less tasty and less flavorful than the similarly homogenous strains that came and then succumbed before it, what would a banana licuado have tasted like before? Would it have been considered a delicacy instead of merely a particularly tasty afternoon snack? Would the Queen of Spain have ordered it for dessert as an exotic treat from the Americas — would her court have watched on in jealousy as she slurped the frothy dregs off the bottom of her crystal fountain glass? Mostly, I think about it in my 3 o’clock Friday afternoon philosophy class: I am running out of time. We are all running out of time. My plane ticket back to Atlanta is dated two months from now; for the banana, a very different kind of departure from the scene, a more permanent and sinister leavetaking, hovers darkly on the horizon. I may find myself back in prime banana licuado territory next summer or the year after; meanwhile, the banana licuado slips further towards the edge of an early retirement from the menus of South American cafés everywhere, a retreat from which there can be no re-peel.
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