What’s Wrong with Bananas
nautil.us
nautil.us
I remember a conversation with a coworker several years ago in which I was trying to convey the difficulty of sensibly defining "organic" farming. His first suggestion: "food that hasn't had chemicals put in it". When I asked him to explain what "chemical" means, he thought for a while then moved onto what was quite a clever second attempt: "food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention". I pointed out that without humans, bananas as he knew and loved them (I think he ate plenty) would become extinct quite quickly.
I have found out, since then, that apples grown for their edibility are grown from grafts, not seeds. Most likely, someone at some point stopped on that island and had lunch, and left apple seeds on the island, which eventually grew into a wild apple tree. Wild apples aren't edible, and the apples we know and love have been carefully bred to be the way they are.
However, taste is just one of many criteria when deciding which apples to grow. For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. They are also small, do not produce regular quantities each year and prone to diseases. So they are not viable for commercial use but still the best apple you have ever tasted if you manage to find one.
So perhaps organic could also mean focusing on other criteria than growing fruit that is most viable to grow in huge quantities, that is more resistant to various diseases and other chemicals that kill insects/fungi, that look beautiful and have a long shelf life and taste good enough.
>For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty.
Ha ha, I've eaten a few Indian fruits that are like that, both as a kid and later. One is jujube [1], called ber in Hindi. When living in Central India as a teenager, used to wander around in open, lightly forested areas near the town, which had these ber trees. We used to eat plenty of their fruit for free. Very tasty. Sweet. The still-slightly-unripe ones were the best. Overripe ones had a bit of a bad smell though. Yellowish-green in color when under-ripe, red when ripe, a bit smaller than, or the same size as a golf ball. I think they probably were high in sugar (fructose, maybe) since when sold in bazaars, flies were usually buzzing around them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube
Another one was karonda [2]. Tangy, sour, astringent, may best describe its taste. Makes your mouth literally water - a lot. Punjabi people make a pickle from it. I had some of that pickle once in a Bangalore restaurant. Mind-blowing taste.
"organic" is just a marketing label.
Instead of trying to sort everything into two bins and decide how to gatekeep "organic" how about we do science and education and labeling to teach people the details of how their food is bred and produced and how quality and effects vary.
[1]https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...
[2]https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-sustaina...
Apples are a bit special in that they don't grow true to seed; that's the reason for the grafting. If you plant a Braeburn, you don't get Braeburn fruit.
In Kent, UK, there's an orchard with around 2,000 apple varieties (it's possible there were closer to 10,000 over the past few centuries). I'd guess more than a hundred of those wouldn't be palatable for consumption - varieties that have been selected for sauce, baking, cider, jelly (jam), etc.
Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents - so it's not that 'wild apples aren't edible' (clearly that's not true) but rather hybrid apples aren't exactly like either parent. This is neither a bad nor a good thing.
I will say that apples grown for their type are replicated via grafts or cuttings.
Not apples, they're exactly the opposite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding
>This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.
Apple breeders do identify favourable traits from existing cultivars, and may then do selective back-crossing:
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/844-breeding-a-new...
For instance all granny smith's trace back to a single tree somewhere in Australia. If you let a variety die, it's gone forever as you'll never recreate it. Which is my biggest regret of the way supermarkets want to sell us just a few "standard" varieties. Countless fine apples have been lost forever.
While a random specimen on an island in a lake is indeed most likely a seedling, my point was that assessing the quality of an apple is more nuanced than noting if one fruit at one point in time tastes nice.
If you're in / next time you are in the UK, be sure to get out to Brogdale - they have apple and cherry and cider festivals, with an astounding number of varieties (only two of each tree though).
It is profoundly sad that it's such a painful process to get varieties through quarantine and into Australia - I tried a Braddick's Nonpareil there one time - my instant favourite apple ever. May be similar to a Sturmer Pippin (which is available in AU).
only thing you can do with those is make alcohol.
he was an alcohol merchant!
Those are important qualities for food, no need to disregard it as spin.
Most organic produce probably has more pesticide residue than non-organic produce. Definitely more toxic residue than non-organic produce, as it turns out that agrichemical firms want to optimize their pesticides to minimize human harm as opposed to "natural" pesticides that rely on being toxic to everything.
Do you have any substantial sources for such a tragic claim?
For example here[1] is an EU funded meta-review from 2014 which finds: " the frequency of occurrence of pesticide residues was found to be four times higher in conventional crops, which also contained significantly higher concentrations of the toxic metal Cd. "
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
This doesn't accord with any existing definitions, which restrict the type of pesticide as well as perhaps the amount. Which then begs the question of which pesticides should be classed as organic. We already have stringent constraints on pesticide residue levels.
As for seed, even certified organic growers rely on the seed industry, so I'm not sure that fits either.
If you look at the genomes of our major food crops, it turns out that we've done really weird things to them (such as duplicating all the chromosomes), and that's well before we started doing gene transplanting via modern GMO techniques.
A good visual indication of how wildly we've been able to transform crops by ancient domestication is maize. You've probably seen the standard corn cob. The closest wild relative (and probable pre-domesticated ancestor) is teosinte. A teosinte cob-equivalent has maybe a dozen kernels, which are not obviously edible. The difference is so stark that some don't believe that domestication started with teosinte because it looks too hard.
You don't have to agree with every rule and regulation they've come up with. Personally I'm not that worried about GMOs but I do tend to buy organic anyways because it uses less pesticides and fertilizers.
The "spin" is more about how organic food is portrayed, and how that affects food markets and science.
It's okay for well-to-do folks to occasionally buy organic, but it's not a sustainable model for feeding a growing population and the more demand rises for organic, the harder it becomes to devote resources to a viable solution.
There's no evidence that GMO's pose a risk to health or the environment, yet (for example) the EU's chief scientific officer Anne Glover was essentially sacked for her support of GM crops.
That’s literally how we get all our food anyways. Even the “organic” crops we grow today have been a product of intensive artificial selection by humans.
In a lot of cases, the result of that wouldn't be anything we would recognize as food. The vast majority of our crops have been so altered by humanity that the notion of their growing "without human intervention" is a farce.
I've read this over and over again in so many articles... but is it really true?
In Brazil at least, every supermarket has several types of bananas [1], only one of which is Cavendish. (Similar to how a US supermarket will have several types of apples.)
So seeing as the fifth-largest country has plenty of banana variety... I'm curious if anyone can chime in on other places outside of North America.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=tipos+de+bananas&safe=off&rl...:
Only ever one variety of banana in the UK, with size and organic or not your only choices. I can't ever remember more than one banana variety, though they sure seem like a different single variety than I remember from my youth. Maybe that's just the awful ripeness issue.
Most of the English apple varieties, with the more complex flavours, have gone too. Lots of "varieties" vast, shiny, tasteless balls of sugar from assorted overseas sources. They look more consistent, so easy for supermarkets to love. I hate supermarkets the more I've grown to love food.
But generally in most places that I've shopped in Texas in my life there are only Cavendish available and possibly one shorter variety with which I (and most of the folks here) are wholly unfamiliar.
So I can't say if the statement is true, but it does match with my experience.
Might give you a handful of edible fruits, but nothing like the bounty you would get from a grafted tree producing 100s and 100s of fruits as well
Culinary fruits, on the other hand, perhaps they are mostly cloned.
Potatoes can be grown from both seeds and cut tubers but the former is usually avoided because the potato genome is very complex and sexually produced potatoes tend to segregate into multiple phenotypes which usually reduces yield,hence it is rare to grow potato from seeds outside R&D. A lot of fruit fall under the same category as their traits are rather unstable if reproduced sexually.
Staple food crops such as wheat and rice does not suffer from this issue because they have been selected for much longer and their physiology is much more amenable to plant seeds.
Bananas trees will put out new shoots which will then grow into a banana tree. These side suckers are just dug out and used to propagate to a new tree. Which is different near all cloning / grafting / cutting techniques
Among many: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194173. The banana is dying and the suit is back!
It seems to be stating that there was a very popular banana variety called "gros michel", a disease came along that affects gros michel bananas and farmers started replacing gros michel bananas with "cavendish" bananas.
Now there is a disease that kills cavendish bananas, so presumably farmers will start planting a different type of banana to replace cavendish, right? what's the big deal?
The red queen hypothesis is that organisms adapt and change in response to an ever-changing background environment, just to maintain the status-quo. The changes ripple out, causing all neighboring organisms to adopt changes as well, to try and maintain their relative position in the environment. The name "red queen" comes from Lewis Carroll's Looking Glass, "Alice finds herself running faster and faster but saying in the same place. ... 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.'"
How this relates to bananas is that reproduction is one of the ways organisms adopt changes to themselves (new DNA). The gros micheal bananas and cavendish bananas do not reproduce, they are all clones. As a result, all of the bananas are a monoculture which allows pathogens to spread quickly and destroy them. New bananas are likely to have the same problem, unless they reproduce and are not clones.
What I find more interesting is that similar problems occur in computing systems, where many datacenters or computing environments (hospitals, large enterprise offices) are running all the same or nearly same operating systems. The fast spread of worms and viruses are usually because the same exploit works everywhere, due to the monoculture.
Except people write this exact article about these two banana varieties about 10 times a year and it's just sensationalism.
TL;DR your grandchildren might eat a different variety of banana you don't recognize. Move along