The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction | Hacker News Reader

The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction

qz.com

57 pointstokenadult24 comments

This article by the same author from March of last year (2014) is longer, and does a more thorough job explaining the context and the threat:

http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-... (and HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326)

I’d recommend just reading that one and skipping the current article, which consists of a tiny bit of background wrapped around a link to the recent study http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...

> This article by the same article

The singularity has arrived! The articles are writing themselves! ;)

Not all is bad, though. The Cavendish is not exactly the most tasty banana, and all the replacements that people are looking at (Goldfinger, which is shorter, thicker and straighter, Sedas, which is apparently a resistant Gros Michel) are all tastier than the Cavendish.

My understanding is that it's the commercial viability that is really threatened, that the variety would still survive. It's also my understanding that a Gros Michel can be had here and there.

I would like to try a Gros Michel some day. My interest was piqued when someone told me it tastes like "banana flavor".

A quick check of Wikipedia says that it's still produced in Thailand and Malaysia and exported to other countries in Asia.

It's just that since most of the Gros Michel plantations in South America and Africa got wiped out, exports to North America and Europe basically shut down.

I too wouldn't mind trying one, for the same reasons... guess it's a solid reason I should visit Southeast Asia at least once before I die.

You mean like those banana candies that taste nothing like bananas? I heard that too: that the artificial banana flavour is very close to the Gros Michel. No idea why nobody updated it to taste more like the Cavendish. If the Gros Michel ever comes back, we'll probably think it tastes too artificial.

The story probably isn't true:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140829-the-secrets-of-fake...

Banana flavor is a pretty simple compound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoamyl_acetate

So the Gros Michel containing more of it (or having a simpler flavor profile) probably explains the closer flavor match more than any effort devoted to matching the flavor up with the variety.

Gros Michel bananas have been gone long enough that if it comes back, people will miss the flavor of Cavendish bananas. Oh dear.

Here in Vietnam I see at least half a dozen different kinds of bananas of all shapes and sizes every time I go to the market. Most taste better than American supermarket bananas too.

It was the same when I was on vacation in Indonesia. There's clearly a wealth of bananas in south-east Asia. Most of them were really tiny though, and probably hard to sell in the west.

American people think bananas are only those. Most of them have never seen a different banana.

A few local supermarket chains here sell red bananas. I tried them a few times[1], but the taste difference was not dramatic or worth the additional price.

I'm an American, so not all of us are clueless :)

I'd wager that most of Western Society doesn't know other varieties exist (not just Americans) because most varieties not easy to transport long distances.

[1] Reading http://www.amazon.com/Banana-Fate-Fruit-Changed-World/dp/045... and listening to an NPR interview with the author prompted me to go on a search for banana varieties.

Check out some asian grocery stores. They have bananas not from the Dole. I tried the Dole red banana but really didn't like it. The Asian grocery stores should have a few other varieties. But you are right that the common variety seems to be the only one that can be reliably shipped long distances. Most of the US cannot grow bananas natively since they cannot handle cold temperatures.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check a few out. Pretty sure the ones I had were Dole, so that might explain my assessment.

Bananas are astonishing. Compare them to apples, from the viewpoint of a North American consumer.

1. Bananas are grown thousands of miles away. Apples are typically grown within a few hundred.

2. Bananas have to be transported in refrigerated ships, trucks, and trains, and even then only keep for a couple weeks after harvest. Apples are easy to transport and keep for months.

Yet bananas are cheaper than apples!

How that came to be is covered in this interesting article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref...

> Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

It astounds me that Big Banana has been "slow" to react, given that "By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt"!

This is horrible news. I love bananas and eat at least 365/year. I recently got a blender so that I could make smoothies -- to fool my kid into eating both a banana and a glass of milk in the morning :)

The article didn't make it clear, though, whether every variety of banana is affected, or just the big yellow ones called "Cavendish". When I lived in Taiwan (early 80s), there were all sorts of bananas -- Cavendish, little yellow ones, little red ones. In fact these little reddish-skinned ones with a tart yellow fruit grew in my back yard at the time. Really tasty.

Maybe it's time to install a small tropical greenhouse in the back yard and grow one's own bananas. If mainstream bananas become scarce and expensive, this could be like tomatoes -- everyone will want to grow them. A business opportunity for someone, possibly.

The particular problem strain of the Panama disease affects the Cavendish specifically. This has happened before; the Cavendish, itself, only became the dominant cultivar after other strains of the same disease killed the previous dominant cultivar, the Gros Michel. All members of a given cultivar are clones, so they're genetically identical and thus very susceptible to being wiped out by disease as they have no mechanism to evolve resistance. We'll probably just have to switch again.

Between seedbanks and genome sequencing, there is really no excuse for us letting major (sub-)species go extinct anymore.

Cavendish are seedless, they only grow vegetatively. They are genetically identical. That's the problem. Panama disease is a fungus. Fungi are nearly impossible to eliminate.

If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend this article:

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-t...

In fact, I recommend any of their articles.

Didn't we have the gros michel?

Thus the song, "Yes, we have no bananas".

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