What’s Wrong with Bananas (2018) | Hacker News Reader

What’s Wrong with Bananas (2018)

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58 pointsdnetesn77 comments

I guess the bananocalypse will eventually come some day. But it has been predicted to come for decades already.

2005: The Cavendish, the version of the banana that rests on top of American breakfast cereals, is "on a crash course toward extinction."

2010: a new strain of the Panama disease, that the Cavendish banana is not resistant to, sprung up in 1992 and threatens the world’s most popular banana once again

2016: Why bananas as we know them might go extinct

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/business/media/no-serious...

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/06/commercial-...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/22/africa/banana-panama-dise...

The truly baffling thing to me, is I swear one of the hardest emphasized lessons in grade school was on the dangers of a monoculture. And yet, the vast majority of farming seems to just double down on it.

Worse, non-farming does to. So many societies and institutions seem to try and build up the equivalent.

The problem is that monocultures enjoy great economies of scale, and it's extremely difficult to fight the market.

The little farmer who grows a variety of crops is out-competed by the corn growing neighbor who has relatively cheap specialized equipment and seeds available to allow him to work ever larger and more productive fields for year after year. The little guy ends up closing shop before the neighbor gets wiped out by some highly specialized pathogen. As John Maynard Keynes noted, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Monocultures might be a bad idea in the long term, but for immediate profits they cannot be beat.

The threat of monoculture is overblown.

Yes if your entire society relies on one staple crop that has low diversity and no pest management, you are at high risk, but that is not modern society.

If the cavendish is wiped out, people would barely notice. Even if it happened with corn, it would be disruptive, but not catastrophic. Our food system is too diversified to really collapse from one disease.

The British switched from coffee to tea because their monoculture coffee plantations in what used to be called Ceylon died from blight. Their plantations were the descendants of 6 plants. A disease that affected one coffee bush affected every coffee bush.

The Irish Potato Famine happened because their potatoes were descended from a single handful of potatoes. As a result, a fungus that affected one potato plant affected every other potato plant. About a million people died from that.

The corn blight in 1970 resulted in the loss of 1/3 of the US corn crop. If the weather hadn't broken, up to 85% of that year's crop could have died. 85% of the seed grown back then used Texas Male Sterile Cytoplasm as part of the hybridization process. In response, the US government created and continues massive subsidies for corn production. This is why high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than cane/beet sugar, and why HFCS is so widespread in US food production.

One book that covers the history of monoculture failures like this is Altered Harvest:

https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Harvest-Jack-Doyle/dp/0140096...

One book that covers how prevalent corn is in American food production is Omnivore's Dilemma.

https://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Mea...

The banana flavor used in candies tastes nothing like Cavendish bananas. That flavor was based on the Gros Michel variety that went economically extinct in the 1950s.

> The British switched from coffee to tea because their monoculture coffee plantations in what used to be called Ceylon died from blight.

its quite unfortunate as srilankan coffee is quite good and tragically under appreciated. most locals will serve you nescafe as they think its "fancy"

You bring up a lot of good points. But in regards to:

>...This is why high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than cane/beet sugar, and why HFCS is so widespread in US food production.

As you point out corn subsidies lower the cost for HFCS, but the US also uses import restrictions to keep the US sugar price much higher than what it is in other countries:

>...The US sugar industry receives enormous government support and protection from foreign competition. The sugar program has changed over time, becoming a complex set of rules developed to promote sugar production primarily at the expense of domestic consumers. The program has also affected foreign producers and consumers through import restrictions that have significantly reduced the world sugar price. Since the mid-1970s, as a result of the sugar program, the price of sugar in the United States has been almost twice as high as the price of sugar on the world market in most years.

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/-sweets-for-t...

I grew up near a statue to the boll weevil. So, exactly. It can happen. Does even. Rubber trees, if I'm not mistaken, are another good example.

Doesn't mean that specialization can't have obvious benefits.

Enterprise, AL?

Yeah. I was actually "close" as in the same State. So, not right next to it. Did visit it, if I remember. (Granted. I "remember" a lot of things I didn't fully do. Maybe we just had a class that talked a lot about it. :D )

It's just an advanced form of 'hand to mouth' existence, maybe we should call it 'capital to wallet' The fact a crash will come tomorrow doesn't stop most actors from doing what's going to profit them the most today.

I think it is a little more nuanced, in practice. For a lot of amazing progress and such, the short term doubling down on something seems to make a ton of sense. As such, for the individual farmer and all, risky idea. For the town and the society, they can often ride the reward with minimal exposure to the risk.

My personal pipe dream is that we found a way to not load so much downside of risks on individuals. Which seems to be what we do.

It’s another example of “the tragedy of the commons”. Each individual actor is acting in their own short-term interest, at the expense of everybody’s long term interest.

The problem with bananas specifically is that if you don’t have a seedless product, you don’t have a product to sell at all.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Banana_cross_secti...

And that means monocultures propagated from cuttings.

It is the same thing as centralization/decentralization. Centralization is more efficient (economies of scale and other things) but more fragile.

I am seeing a renaissance in Apple varieties. Coffea is not a monoculture. Will other fruits and vegetables follow?

The bananapocalypse already happened:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana

Eh, they definitely aren't fit for major cultivation anymore, but you can still find them.

I picked up a basket (with a bunch of other varieties) from miamifruit.org a while back. They can't ship a lot of things to California, but if you live elsewhere in the lower 48 you should check them out.

Hence, the article...

> A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade.

Just a reminder that this isn't true if you walk into an average supermarket in Brazil. You'll find banana prata, banana nanica, banana maçã, banana ouro, banana da terra... just look at an online supermarket search [1]. And to be clear these are all bananas eaten as fruit, not plaintains or anything. Wikipedia lists even more [2].

But somehow the English-speaking world ignores their existence. And it's not like they're exotic varieties you have to hunt down in rural areas or something. They're just the standard normal variety of bananas you buy at any urban supermarket. (Same as in an American supermarket you don't expect only one type of apple, but expect to see honeycrisp, fuji, granny smith, and so forth.)

[1] https://www.paodeacucar.com/busca?terms=banana&p=1

[2] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana#Como_alimento

> But somehow the English-speaking world ignores their existence. And it's not like they're exotic varieties you have to hunt down in rural areas or something.

Maybe because these banana breeds don't take lightly to the multi-week shipments required for bananas to be eaten in Europe?

Yeah maybe for Europe, but I'd think it wouldn't be too hard to plant them in Mexico and ship them to the US by truck.

Brazil's a big country too and it's not like all the bananas are grown an hour outside the cities or anything. These sit around in supermarkets, they're not delicacies you have to find at a farmer's market that go bad in a day or something.

I really wonder if the issue really is just lack of awareness. I can't count the number of articles I've read that basically lead you to think Cavendish is the only banana being grown at large scale anymore, when that's just not true.

Export markets are going to be defined by what can be traded in tonnages, not boutique luxury foods that are expensive and risky to ship, nor would any agriculture company risk the investment to cultivate them at scale for export from Mexico

They're not "boutique luxury foods", they're just normal fruit.

And here in NYC a lot of the produce I buy comes from Mexico at scale, including things like ripe cherry tomatoes grown in greenhouses that are much more "luxury" than bananas. But also just everyday papayas and avocados.

So given that so many fruits and vegetables are already cultivated at scale for export from Mexico, it's not clear why banana varieties are that different. To the contrary, all sorts of new fruit varieties are being invested in, grown and shipped from other countries. Just yesterday I bought cara cara navel oranges and blood oranges too from my normal average supermarket, which certainly weren't available here five years ago at an average store.

There are many different kinds of banana grown in North America. I ate them growing up in Florida. The burro banana and the red banana come to mind. But they just aren't as cheap as the Cavendish, which is one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) fruits by weight period.

Being simultaneously soft enough to eat raw and durable enough to ship and store is really threading the needle. There are many varieties of plantain (it's hard) and many varieties of bananas that are hard to ship. The Cavendish is often the only fruit available at convenience stores, maybe alongside a few oranges, because it's just so darn convenient.

What do you think the definition of a "boutique" fruit is, exactly?

I would think it would have a lot less from being some actual boon from the gods and more a fruit in limited supply in the region of interest.

Maybe we need a new rule, like the one about medical advancements... in mice.

> nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade... in USA and Western Europe

Thailand has many as well.

I’m often disappointed that here in Australia the Cavendish is so dominant. We do sometimes get Red Daccas, and lady-finger bananas but not a lot else. And can I find a fe’i? Nope…

Going to be trying to grow ice-cream bananas soon I think!

I live in Cambodia. We have 21 or so different varieties of bananas, all pretty different. Our bananas are tangier, sweeter, and we have many ways to prepare them. I definitely eat at least half a pound a day of them. They grow so easily and sprout up out of the ground from their rhizomes. After the banana "tree" flowers and produces a bunch of bananas, it soon dies; so we chop up the tree and feed it to our animals and 3 more trees grow in its place.

As a foreigner I buy a bunch of bananas for 25¢ to 50¢ usually.

In kerala, India too we have so many varities of bananas Robusta, Palayankodan, Poovan, Njalipoovan, Kadali, Chenkadali, Karpooravally, Poomkalli, Koompillakannan, Chinali, Virupakshi, Plantain to name few.

And in Europe i see everywhere only cavendishes or plantains unfortunately

Wow. I was going to mention the Nendran (Kerala), a somewhat unique banana variety in both appearance and taste, but did not know all those ones you mentioned.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changalikodan

> Robusta

Is a variety of Cavendish.

> I definitely eat at least half a pound a day of them

What's your response to somebody who spends $1) at Dunkin Donuts in the morning for breakfast (large iced coffee, ham + egg + cheese sandwich on an English muffin, 2 orders of hash browns), then typically something like $20 at Moe's for dinner (some kind of bowl of chicken + rice + beans + chips + guacamole + queso dip) (or Chipotle or Chick-Fil-A)

$30/day for 2 very "low quality" fast food to go meals

My response is that not everything is South East Asian prices, and even in Cambodia you can pay a lot for food if you're eating at the wrong places and eating more expensive stuff. Mexican food is expensive here and not particularly good for instance. (My Cambodian friends do make some really good home made Mexican food from scratch sometimes though)

Honestly I like cheese and potatoes and egg and all, I just don't think I could consume that much of those in a day. I rarely eat eggs or dairy or bread just because they're not so popular over in Asia. I am known for eating much more than Cambodians though.

Typically I skip breakfast, then for lunch I make a rice cooker full of rice and I go to the Asian "fast food" place and buy 2 bags of ready made food (either ginger chicken, stir fried eggplant, green beans and tofu, beef intestine curry with morning glories, palm sugar pork fat soup, or bitter gourd ground pork soup) and we eat that on our rice.

Typically those two bags of food cost us $1.50 and feeds 4 people, the cost of the rice being so negligible I don't count it. We usually get 2 meals a day like that which comes out to $3 or $4 a day for 4 people and we eat to our heart's content.

In-between meals I'll eat bananas or papayas that grow in our yard. Often I'll eat a lot of those at a time so that they don't spoil. I also make a lot of oatmeal chocolate coconut peanut butter no-bake cookies. (These are a bit more expensive treat and maybe cost $0.15 a piece in materials)

When we eat at the regular places in Cambodia it's usually $2.50 a meal per person, so we try to avoid that.

Coming back to the United States, most regular restaurants seem to cost at least $12 a person and it's a bit weird for me since I prefer eating cheap home-made meals and don't really get the appeal of restaurants.

There’s a great freakonomics episode on exactly what’s going on with bananas.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-interesting-fruit-...

like the poster said above, NPR has been scaring us with banana doomsday events for years.. I remember listening to NPR in 2006, preparing for the end of the banana

Simular thing for how the US chicken industry used the same line of roosters to produce chickens and then faced some issues from it a few years ago.

I feel as if I've read this before, about the risks of putting all bananas in one basked so to speak. Still, interesting. I did not know that the banana can be classified as "our most important fresh fruit crop".

Also, this part was ... quirky and made me want to click for more details or something:

A McDonald’s burger and fries meal hardly varies from Riverside, California, to Elk Grove, Illinois, to Uppsala, Sweden. (Actually, McDonald’s fries in Sweden are a pleasant surprise.)

They definitely are the most important fresh fruit. Bananas are the most consumed fresh fruit - the average person eats 32 pounds of bananas a year. They're the most popular fruit in many developed countries and a staple food in many developing countries. Now, not all of these are Cavendish, of course. Other countries, especially in banana-producing regions, have much wider varieties of bananas in their diets.

The only fruit more popular is tomatoes - the average person eats 50 pounds of those a year. But they are typically not consumed fresh.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-popular-fruit-i...

In Sweden we have the chain Max which is a direct competitor to McD. Max switched their fries to a much crunchier variant with the peel left on a couple of years ago, and we discussed just the other day that McD fries is not as loose and sloppy as it used to be. We guessed it might be a market adaptation to the (imho) much better Max fries.

So... if McDonalds french fries had been left to their typical sexual reproduction instead of mankind meddling and creating asexual clones then the McDonalds french fry would have adapted to the changing environment and increased competition from the Max french fry by itself?

MAX Burgers: https://www.maxburgers.com/

> with the peel left on

So much food waste reduction by doing that.

There is a McDonalds at the intersection of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Cross Bronx Expressway. One time in the middle of the night I ordered whatever hamburger and received a double cheeseburger with fried onions(fried onions are not on the McDonalds menu).

That same McDondalds on another visit I found the drive-thru worker head down sleeping on the counter.

The exception that proves the rule. I remember that McDonald's hamburger.

Non-JS Archive [1]

I was actually expecting something different. For me what's wrong with bananas is the mixed bag of health. They have some good nutrients but also 14G of sugar and only 3G of fiber and somehow manage to have 27G of carbohydrates and a GI of 51. 51 is not bad on the Glycemic Index but I personally consider a banana a rare treat.

[1] - https://archive.ph/FjeAB

Crazy thing is that I can't find pure banana flavored ice cream in my local supermarket.

If you can't find pure banana flavored ice cream, you might try making pure banana ice cream :)

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/3038-one-ingredient-bana...

There are many interesting cultivars of bananas. Cavendish is the worst banana available, and the sooner it goes extinct in mass ag, the better.

I've tried a small handful of different bananas (maybe a half-dozen?) and nah. Cavendish is above average. Certainly there are better, and more varieties being available would be awesome, but Cavendish is nowhere near the bottom of the pack.

Red Delicious apples, now, those belong in the dustbin of history :) Perhaps we can do to banana varieties what we did to apples and have nice wide variety to choose from at the store.

I used to work in a grocery store. I had a conversation with the lady in Floral (she was ancient) about Red Delicious apples. I guess they used to actually be delicious, so she says. Something went wrong over the years.

One thing I can tell you from experience is that they're weirdly resistant to decay. Everything else will go bad in patches. If you've got a bad orange, you've probably got eight partially bad oranges next to it. I saw a bad red delicious apple once, the rest of the case was pristine.

> Something went wrong over the years

Yeah, they bred the for being shippable, over flavor.

https://www.myrecipes.com/how-to/cooking-questions/why-are-r...

Same thing with tomatoes: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-do-uk-tomatoes-taste-bad

> Something went wrong over the years. They're weirdly resistant to decay.

(Nobody expected the research advances in plant physiology, he, he)

Applacadabra! Poof! Flavor will vanish now by invoking the power of science but your beauty will last forever! Take that, snow white's witch!

https://www.agrofresh.com/solutions/harvista/

Yup, we can delay aging in apples and is standard since many decades ago

Fuji, and now cosmic crisp... Red delicious should only exist for pies

I much prefer pies that are baked with a very tart apple, which mellows out and gives lots of complex flavour when cooked. Back home we had "cooking apples" especially meant for this which were basically inedible when raw. Now I'm in the US and can't find such apples and can't stand the apple pies here that are overly sweet and bland.

Have you tried going to a farmers market? Ask the sellers what apple to use for pie, and they'll direct you to cooking apples. This is especially true if you go to an Amish market.

This is what you need:

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

Apparently the tree is available in the US:

https://www.orangepippintrees.com/trees/apple-trees/bramleys...

I usually use half Grannie Smith and half something more aromatic in a pie. The Grannie provides firmness and tartness and the other varieties provide more appleiness. I control the sweetness with how much sugar I add, usually using less than the recipes call for.

hard to find commercially in the US but we tend to call them "crabapples" (many crabapples are too small or only suitable for juicing but some are large enough for culinary use), or you can look for some cider homebrewing enthusiasts who may know how to source tart/dry apples in your area.

Red delicious is a terrible pie apple, unless you hate the flavor of apples and only want sugary cinnamonny mush.

My favourite apple variety right now is the organic Cripp, aka Pink Lady. Lovely aroma and flavours. I used to eat Granny Smiths in my youth, but they're too tart and green compared to those nice organic Cripps.

Red delicious are great for dehydrated apple chips. Though I admit I haven't found any use for them outside of that.

It depends on your benchmark.

I have nothing to cite but, just based on their ubiquity, I would bet $5 against the hole in a bagel that Cavendish bananas produce more per acre than any other variety.

I think the reason Cavendish is the main crop is because it can survive shipping and handling well. Most varieties of bananas can't.

And some of that Cavendish preference is strictly cosmetic. Some varieties will blemish easily but still taste great inside for a while, while Cavendish blemishing means you’ve got 1-2 days tops to consume it.

Yes.

Also also, Cavendish is a "dessert banana". Most banana varieties are more like plantains -- they're savory and are usually cooked.

Shipping, and relatedly, it will mature somewhat after picking. I suspect, much like a tomato, the closer you pick it to ripe, the better it actually is.

Yeah, no. I'd choose a Robusta Cavendish over a sickly-sweet Chakkarakeli or a mealy Nendran any day.

Nendran can be eaten either raw (i.e. ripe, but uncooked) or boiled, often with a little jaggery and spices like cardamom. People who don't like raw ripe Nendran may find the cooked variant tastes good, although it is not like the experience of eating a fresh banana. More like eating a cooked dessert, vaguely like a Western pudding. IMO the mealiness becomes a plus when it is eaten way.

Also, Nendran has an indescribable but distinct flavor which is different from a regular dessert banana.

Discussed at the time:

What’s Wrong with Bananas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355575 - Nov 2018 (54 comments)

Also related:

The search is on for banana ancestors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247667 - Oct 2022 (22 comments)

Parable of the Banana - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26977808 - April 2021 (3 comments)

The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20681954 - Aug 2019 (191 comments)

The Cavendish banana is facing extinction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192671 - Oct 2018 (67 comments)

The Banana As We Know It Is Dying Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16093580 - Jan 2018 (110 comments)

The Cavendish banana is under threat from a fungus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918 - Oct 2017 (45 comments)

The Cavendish Banana Will Soon Be Gone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883805 - March 2017 (70 comments)

The Miracle of the Modern Banana - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12263727 - Aug 2016 (35 comments)

The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653220 - Dec 2015 (24 comments)

How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326 - Sept 2014 (104 comments)

Researchers fear that a fungus could cripple the world's banana monoculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753317 - May 2014 (7 comments)

Fungus threatens top banana - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6923823 - Dec 2013 (48 comments)

The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978934 - Dec 2010 (35 comments)∑

I always find it funny when people say “nature provides everything we need” and then refer to fruit like our current banana cultivars

Behold the Atheist's Nightmare!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A

Dunno 'bout all that .. but I like the colour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo

Nature provides everything we need, but sometimes nature's method of providing what we need is humans.

The best is when people learn that lemons were basically created by us. :D "When life refused to give you lemons, make them!"

Nature may provide everything we need, but not everything we want.

Nobody needs bananas.

Not for current population sizes I guess.

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