Yes,we'll have no bananas some day soon

Once you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century - enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite - will begin to unravel.

The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world's biggest banana exporter. But something larger is going on that will affect prices for years to come.

That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They are grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they are cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and kept for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.