Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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> 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?

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.

> because most varieties of bananas in nature are ugly as hell and have seeds

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.

Many of those variants are related to the Cavendish or GM, and are not resistant to existing threats.

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).

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

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.

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