The Cavendish Banana Will Soon Be Gone
wired.com
wired.com
Pretty much all fruit trees used in agriculture are produced by cloning; generally speaking producing excess fruit is not a productive mutation for a plant, especially when the fruit is high calorie. So to a good approximation, fruit trees grown from seed are extremely unlikely to bear enough fruit to be useful.
Sweet bananas are the example used here, but pretty much all fruit trees share this. There's essentially one (two if you count Dwarf Cavendish) sweet banana -- all sweet bananas you find in a store will be clones of one of those two. Same for avocados -- exactly two genetically identical sources of avocados (at commercial scale; a wild avocado tree will produce some small number of avocados every couple of years). Apples have a much greater variety of cultivars, but every Red Delicious you eat comes from a tree that is a genetic clone of all the others.
There's a danger from monocultures in agriculture in general, but at least for plants grown from seed, there's some natural genetic variety that might yield resistance from large-scale blights. Fruit trees are much more vulnerable to this sort of problem.
A similar thing happens with guavas, to the point that they have been classified as an invasive alien species. They often grow under bridges, apparently spread primarily by homeless people eating the wild fruits.
I was surprised some years ago when I learned that most apple trees are grafts: you take a branch from a tree with apples you like, attach it to a shoot of some other apple tree, and it will produce the apples you like. A neighbor's tree had burned down, and he had no idea what sort of apples the shoots sprouting from the stump would produce.
IIRC, it's even worse than that. You will almost always get a wild-type apple with an often inedible flavor profile or texture.
The orchards they use to develop new apple varieties have thousands of trees, and might not even produce a single new marketable type.
I believe the reason for this is that taste and quality of fruit is quite random in pollinated seeds, seeds from a single tree will bear apples quite distinct from what the "parent" had, so if you want predictable, good fruit you need to clone the upper part by grafting.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episo...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noelani_Van_den_Berg/pu...
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/138610585/yes-we-do-have-banan...
My point being saying it will be "gone" is likely hyperbole. It may end up being less cheaply and readily available, but there are efforts in place now to find its successor which has similar qualities, but is resistant to the numerous problems facing the Cavendish. At this point it looks most likely to be the Goldfinger banana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana.
At least the article makes an effort to blame monocultures, but instead of proposing a better model for a more diversified agriculture, it implies that current troubles are an inescapable result of post-industrial consumerism. But I assert what we're seeing is a result of big agricultural companies' unwillingness to change course on a model that was supposed to maximise profits without any thought of long term viability - a phenomenon that is currently slowly changing through consumer demand for more variety.
Increasing variety is the answer to the robustness problem. When I was a child, there was precisely one type of tomato in the supermarket, and it wasn't great. Today, I typically see more than five, and they all taste pretty good. If I had five types of banana to choose from, that wouldn't be the end of the world either (neither would be the banana dying out, for that matter).
"Having the Food We Want When We Want It" is a highly misleading premise.
The usual big yellows take up the most display, of course, but they also have red bananas, a small yellow variety, and the baking banana (for some reason the name is escaping me at the moment, but these are well known).
I agree with you calling this out as sloppy. "Some believe" that all the (science) writers on the WWW need to be subjected to a marathon of "In search of..." episodes so that they have a chance to see how transparent these cliches are.
From an evolutionary perspective, the idea that the "organism" is the ant colony rather than the ant has a lot going for it; ant colonies can and do reproduce while individual ants, in general, cannot.
But yeah, if you've had even one really good banana (I had a few in Rwanda), you know how inferior the flavor of the Cavendish is.
Optimizing for these things has been far more successful than flavor or nutritional content.
That said, as I understand it (could easily be wrong) some modern cultivars don't really optimize yield, but labor. I suspect the math works out differently for different crops.
The market will reward more things than yeld, just not in "take over the world" scales.
Are identical twins a single organism because they have the same genetics? Of course not and we'd laugh at anyone who based an argument on that premise.
I wouldn't disagree that genetic diversity in plants and animals increase the speed of survival and adaptability probabilities in aggregate. That is however a significantly different argument than the goal of optimization which is what parents are doing when they eg. select for an embryo without BRCA-1.
You can see this everywhere, from tomatoes (and now even cherry tomatoes) that taste like cardboard because producers optimize for pretty looks (which are used to determine if the product is faulty); to bananas.
If we value diversity or some other population metric, then directed engineering can optimize also for that, and better than nature; however, realistically speaking, we're more likely to fall victim to some fad that embryos with gene ABCD-1 seem like the best kids ever but then a generation later find out in large scale that two parents with ABCD-1 result in kids with some horrible side effect.
Just as we optimize for fruit that look well but taste bland (because the consumers in supermarket look but don't taste), we are at a risk to optimize our next generation for "marketable" features at the cost of important but less visible things, e.g. athletic performance at expense of old-age wellbeing, early IQ scores at the expense of mental stability, cosmetic features at the expense of resistance to diseases which didn't matter before a homo sapiens monoculture.
If genetics is just fashion I expect you'd see quite a jump in diversity.
Unless it isn't. Who knows where things will go.
Is there a clear path to arbitrary editing of genes? Nope.
Does that mean that we absolutely won't figure out how to make arbitrary edits? Also nope.
In practice, our best bet is viruses.
Given that constraint, there aren't a lot of ways to jump; very few high-yield banana varieties are available, and none of them really sweet except for the Dwarf Cavendish and Grand Nain cultivars. Agricultural researchers are constantly trying to grow new bananas from seed (which is the easiest way to pursue genetic diversity) but I'm not aware of any new sweet and productive cultivars that have arisen in recent times.
We eat a specific mutated banana from a plant that can only be cloned to get more banana plants.
This isn't out of the ordinary from things we eat. Take the navel orange, or seedless almost anything; lots of different types of apples aren't grown from seed anymore - a cutting is made from a tree, and attached to a different species of apple tree.
What makes you assume they do?
Even if you can provide a wide variety of unprocessed foods in to the supermarket at the same cost you can provide processed foods in to the super market, the cost would not be the same. Unprocessed foods, by their very definition, require processing. The majority of food people eat is not raw. So now I have to spend more time preparing food. Time isn't free.
Even if I'm already preparing food from scratch, you have to learn how to prepare new varieties of food, even if they are marginally different. For instance, I have bought new varieties of rice and sweet potatoes recently, and each time I've had to do a fair amount of research on how to prepare them. And rice and sweet potatoes are foods that I cook by themselves. Preparing a dish with a completely new ingredient takes significantly more
That's not even accounting for economies of scale on the production side. The produce that makes it to the supermarket is a small subset of all of the produce grown. If you want your food to be inexpensive, what you purchase is going to be affected by the demands of industrial food manufacturing. So there might be 1000 types of potatoes in the world, but since McDonalds is only buying one type, 50% of the potatoes grown could be of a single variety.
Plus the products that supermarkets stock are dictated by demand, spoilage, and durability. So even if you want heirloom something-or-other, you might find them extremely difficult to track down because they go bad too quickly in a supermarket, or they bruise easily. They might even just look bad under fluorescent light, who knows.
I'm not saying more variety isn't a good thing; I get excited when new product varietals appear in my store. However I think it's extremely understandable that supermarkets don't carry a wider variety of stock. If you are looking for a wider variety, I've found that Hispanic produce stores and farmer's markets always have a lot of produce that I don't even recognize.
at what might be the same grand total cost
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/we-have-no-bana...
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=bananas&mon...
It is the same sort of self serving delusion that leads to climate change denialism.
If you ever visit India try an Indian carrot (a red carrot), it's incredibly juicy compared with the orange ones I'm used to you get in stores in the UK/USA.
And the same could be done with other monoculture crops. It then becomes an arms race between scientists and viruses.