The Banana As We Know It Is Dying Again
blogs.discovermagazine.com
blogs.discovermagazine.com
Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for sale?
They are ok, they kind of have a more of a 'berry' taste and the 'banana' taste is much weaker.
And they've really pushed it in recent years (warehousing the apples for a long time, reducing the average quality). Or maybe I've gotten more picky. But some of the newer varieties, in season, are just delicious.
Interesting! I love Macintosh apples having grown up on them from my mother who is from Vermont (She makes a mean Apple Pie with only those). Sadly, I can never seem to find them here in the Bay Area. My mother makes a large order shipped from Vermont every Fall.
All that to say, I'm surprised the apples that taste pretty poor to me are closely related to Macintosh.
I was going to mention Hawaii too. There are at least 5 sweet varieties seen commonly in local stores and markets... and still more cooking bananas & plantains.
But other than that, I expect it has a lot to do with what people expect a good banana to look like. E.g. Cavendish bananas tends to get removed from the shelves when they start to go brown/black, while plaintains are often still popular and sold until they've gotten much darker and look overripe and too soft for those of us used to Cavendish, for example. And we expect a certain consistency, and to not have to worry about e.g. deseed a banana - both expectations that'd be violated by a huge portion of the available varieties.
Carrots are in a similar position - there are huge amounts of varieties of all kinds of shapes and colors, yet the "right" look of a carrot is so ingrained that the few other varieties usually on offer tends to be sold almost as novelties.
There was an interesting Forbes piece I read last night that answers this question:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavage/2018/01/04/yes-we-...
TL;DR: because most varieties of bananas in nature are ugly as hell and have seeds; the banana people want must not be like them, and it must also ship efficiently and have good shelf life; only two cultivars managed to hit all of the requirements so far - Gros Michel, and - after it got eaten by disease - Cavendish, which is the one we eat today.
The article points out that the industry has been fully aware of the problems with monoculture for a very long time now, and they don't really have much options to fix it. The text blames modern anti-biotechnology/anti-GMO movements from taking away the one good option we had to solve this - genetic engineering.
I've had several different varieties besides the Cavendish; none of them were ugly or had seeds, and most of them tasted better than the Cavendish.
I suspect it's more about yield and where they can be grown and how well they ship (the others I've had were mostly in places close time here they were grown, though Manzanos sometimes show up in California markets as special items.) And the fact that the market is dominated by a couple corporate behemoths that don't really care to compete with themselves and would rather have two product lines (one organic, one not) than a larger number.
Those that are resistant, without seeds, with similar taste, often have thinner/weaker skins causing more spoilage/loss, lower shelf lives, are more expensive to harvest/store (grow in less dense groups) etc...
Those corporate behemoths would love to save money by not loosing good cropland to viruses that kill their crops, but the only solution to date that doesn't end up costing more elsewhere due to the issues mentioned above is GMO's and their potential to maintain those benefits while adding resistance (or apply those traits to other varieties that are already resistant).
That's hard to believe. Look at tomatoes. We don't need genetic engineering to fix tomatoes, we need a change in marketing & consumer demand. Tomatoes have been hyper-optimized for a small set of parameters, leading to little variety and bland flavor. Yet, if you look in the right places, you can find perfectly edible reasonably priced alternatives, proving the flavorless beefsteak is not the only marketable tomato.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/epis...
In Europe, bananas are branded and consumers have a tendency to choose specific brands based on quality. In Australia, fruits in grocery shops are rarely branded and I found that bananas in Australia are usually not as good: they're just very sweet but kind of plain.
I've heard stories that in Australia, farmers export the best fruits overseas and keep the worst ones to sell locally. I guess it has something to do with the fact that Australian consumers aren't very picky. You have to go to a special farmer's market if you want something good.
Jut as you say - there are other bananas! I've had them! I've had them in the UK, usually from non-mainstream, international food shops. I've had them in Indonesia, New Caledonia and various other Far East/Oceania areas. I've had apple bananas, lady-fingers, Fe'i and more...
There seems to be this delusion that there's such a thing as 'a banana' in the west, so we get 'bananas'. We miss out on the really tasty varieties and we fret that the most generic might die out and then we'd have no bananas. There are loads of genetically diverse types, and what's more if it wasn't for the insane monoculture the spread of disease wouldn't be half as bad.
Some are more sweet like "Prata" some are bigger like "Nanica", some are smaller like "Banana ouro" or one that smells somewhat like an apple called "banana maça".
There is also one for cooking "Banana da terra" used to make fish dishes mainly.
If you go to farmers there are even more.
It's probably a cultural thing, in the Netherlands you can find mainly 2 types, regular international one and the Cooking kind because of Asians mostly, which makes me really sad, Australia is like that as well.
Just having more types on the market doesn't help, you need types that resist the fungus.
I think it got more to do with the fact that Bananas are a domestic fruit in Brazil but need to be imported to the US/Netherlands/Australia.
Importing is more cost efficient at scale, i.e. importing dozens of tons of the same type of banana should be more affordable than importing the same tonnage of a dozen different banana types.
By catering to one or two established tastes you also run less risk of being stuck with excess banana stocks of types that might end up not appealing to the local tastes, so people play it safe and just import the types which are known to sell well.
1. Cold enough and the plant above ground will die but the roots (corm) survives and in spring the plant will grow back amazingly fast. Too cold and the corm will die too, and you're out of luck. The US South and Southwest is good, and of course tropical climates.
The articles always make a persuasive case. So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out?
This article makes the point. The fungus has no quick propogation methods, as it's only spread by moving infected earth: it's simply very resilient once established.
So the last X years have been a slow motion "We know this is a problem. It's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Eventually it will be an insurmountable problem."
The article also notes that there were a substantial number of "flex years" the last time this happened, as deforestation was used to open up new, un-infected land for banana cultivation.
In summary: it's like the IPv6 problem.
We knew it was coming, but resource exhaustion takes time.
Biology, ecology, geology, and cosmology all work on their own timescales. :)
Still has to go through all the usual trials, etc, before it can be grown commercially, and then there'd be questions over GM regulation, market-acceptance, and whether the crop is productive and easy to manage for commercial growers to sort. (Usual productisation questions for a new crop variety to have to jump through.)
Nature exploits opportunities. If we're still planting monocultures of cloned plants (plus whatever genes), that's still going to be enticing prey. See: Roundup resistant weeds.
And life, as they say, finds a way.
The only thing you get from this is annoying humans, which doesn't sound a very good evolutionary strategy (second only to being used in Chinese traditional medicine)
I honestly think this story recurs so often not because it's comparatively important, but because it's a grabby hook of a story and because James Dale of the Queensland University of Technology (who is quoted in every instance of the story I've seen) has an incredibly tenacious publicist.
Actually I’m overstating it — there’s lots of variety in engineered food sounds like breakfast cereals (though interestingly not in potato chip flavors) but the fruit and veggie choices in the supermarkets are pretty limited and boring.
Interestingly enough getting some specific cornflakes was easy and as you said chips and stuff has more variety anyway. On average i had a better selection of swiss chocolate than in neighbooring countries of switzerland.
(the clones obviously belong to some species)
On one side, the consistent fruit makes a cultivar. What's the other side?
To clone is to trick an organism to divide into two or more organisms. This means they have the same strengths and weaknesses because they have nearly the same genes.
Cloning can be done by rooting cuttings of a plant or attaching a cutting of a desirable plant to a root stock of a less desirable version (or a version with qualities like limited height to keep the tree small)
They self propagate like you say (but humans also spread them around). Bananas have a near zero rate of sexual reproduction, if you can get one to produce a seed, it's viability is low.
If you can get the seed to germinate, the resulting "offspring" from that will be distinct from the original banana, a new variety. It will not necessarily be "true to seed". It might be a better banana, or worse.
If you plant a lettuce seed you will get the same lettuce, year over year. Same with peppers and tomatoes, etc. Their traits were bred instead of cloned.
You "might" get the same pepper, lettuce or tomato. If the parent was non-hybrid or open pollinated.
If it's a lettuce, pepper or tomato from the grocery store almost for sure it's a hybrid and you won't get the same plant as the parent.
"Some cultivars "come true from seed", retaining their distinguishing characteristics when grown from seed. Such plants are termed a "variety", "selection" or "strain" but these are ambiguous and confusing words that are best avoided. In general, asexually propagated cultivars grown from seeds produce highly variable seedling plants, and should not be labelled with, or sold under, the parent cultivar's name." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivar#Seed-produced
Furthermore, "Which plants are chosen to be named as cultivars is simply a matter of convenience as the category was created to serve the practical needs of horticulture, agriculture, and forestry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Nomencla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivated_plant_taxonomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banana_cultivars#AAA_G...
Navel oranges are characterized by the growth of a second fruit at the apex, which protrudes slightly and resembles a human navel.
According to a 1917 study by Palemon Dorsett, Archibald Dixon Shamel and Wilson Popenoe of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), a single mutation in a Selecta orange tree planted on the grounds of a monastery near Bahia, Brazil, probably yielded the first navel orange between 1810 and 1820.
Because the mutation left the fruit seedless and, therefore, sterile, the only method to cultivate navel oranges was to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus trees.
It's really worth reading. (There's lots of great stuff on the Flexport blog.)
Excellent additional reading in Growing American Rubber by Mark R. Finlay.
Seems to me from the articles’ tone like the Cavendish was more of an inferior stopgap solution. If we start genetic fixing bananas, doesn‘t it make sense to start on the „better model“?
I guess the better question is what does "better" mean to the consumer? Tastes "better"? Looks "better?" These are subjective traits and consumers are so used to the Cavendish now that if the look, feel and taste isn't similar enough you might have a problem.
However, it that succeeds, perhaps it will inspire people to duplicate the feat with the Big Mike / Gros Michel. And inspire investment to back that, both for profit potential from a "new" product and for insurance in case some new problem befalls the Cavendish.
But I'd bet investors don't want to divide their efforts right now.
This is a pity because a lot of the bananas you see here in SE Asia are more flavorful than the Cavendish anyway. Industrial agriculture's need to produce identical, identifiable, marketable products year after year is responsible for some very destructive and fragile monocultures.
That's all very hand wavy, but I was thinking, might not another alternative be modifying the enemy (bacteria or virus) so that there is a selective weight to a more beneficial alternate bacteria? Of course, any part of humans trying to manage the food supply, or nature in general, will have unintended downstream consequences, but I wonder if there are some other ways to approach the problem.
Also, of commercial bananas don't replicate via seeds, why do they have seeds at all?
But the government started slashing people's plants on their own property to eradicate it. The whole thing was funded by banana farms and forced people to buy from farms rather than grown their own.
I don't think that's what the article is referring to, but do any Australians here remember that campaign? What was that specific disease?
It seems the industry has been working on -
- identifying "tolerant" varieties of Cavendish (there's more than one)
- a GM fusarium-resistant Cavendish
- management regimes for growing fusarium-tolerant crops in infested soil
Looks like bananas won't be disappearing but could be becoming more expensive for a while.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-...
Also, seeing as these are clones.... Is there any way to breed this species of banana for more variety.
I just don't get why people want to import only that variety. It's not great any any way besides being easy to package. Transportation is quite fast nowadays, it shouldn't be that big a problem.
Faster transportation costs more and they have to be shipped before they are ripe and then triggered to ripen in time for sale. And then while they are for sale they probably do better if they are attractive and consistent and known by the consumer.
Can someone explain why it is not possible to create some sort of targeted fungus killer, maybe using something like CRISPR?
1) It's really hard and we just don't know how yet
2) Creating an engineered biological weapon and releasing it into the environment just might have some unintended consequences when it starts interacting with all the things out there which could cause it to mutate
I doubt our understanding of biology is strong enough to be sure that we could do something like that without causing major problems. It would, possibly, be more viable to construct an altered version of the fungus itself which could outcompete the one that kills the bananas, which is the kind of approach that has been investigated for controlling other pests such as mosquitos (although in that case they engineer mosquitos which produce sterile female offspring but viable males, so the males keep breeding and producing more sterile females... eventually you run out of fertile females and tada! No more mosquitos).
This looks like that.
Skepticism is a great trait, but it should be your catalyst, not your conclusion.