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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

The apple guys (the fruit not the tech) have been able to market a variety of cultivars quite successfully. Even the tomato guys are doing good work with the whole "heirloom" thing. I don't get why the banana guys don't try the same thing.

Edit: There are already a bunch of cultivars out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banana_cultivars

And according to this poster, bananas mutate quite easily, so there are actually a huge number of variants out there: http://www.fruitlovers.com/BananaPoster.jpg

Yeah, most of these bananas aren't great for eatin' but surely we made a good banana once, we can do it again.

And if you think hipsters wouldn't pay more for a unique "artisanal heirloom banana" then you don't shop at the Whole Foods down the street from me because those dudes would be all over it like fungus on a Cavendish.

C'mon banana hackers. We need you now more than ever.

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The difference is that bananas are all genetically identical, leaving them much more susceptible to disease. Commercial banana plants are sterile and must be bred by grafting, which isn't the case with apples (to my knowledge).

https://www.commondreams.org/views03/0719-02.htm

Apples don't breed true, so all the store varieties are clones.

The difference is probably more because desirable fruit apples have viable seeds (so it's easier to grow an orchard and just see what tastes good).

You can't breed a banana. The species can't sexually reproduce, so all plants are essentially clones. This makes the production of new breeds very slow (you can't cross-breed to isolate desired traits) and means that when a novel disease arrives, no individual plants will have any immunity.

Bananas in general are not sterile. The Cavendish cultivar is.

The hard part of making new breeds is getting one that is resistant and would probably be accepted at market while not having an overwhelming number of seeds in the fruit (those last two bits overlap a bit).

This is incorrect. You can't breed fertile bananas from the Cavendish, but if somebody kept records of how they got there (crossing which cultivar with what) we could do the same today starting with the original cultivars, which most likely are still around somewhere...

The problem is finding the cultivars and doing the whole experimental process with specific plants and documenting it... Given that bananas grow fairly quickly it is probably relatively do-able. Just need some land and some volunteers... And flying under the radar of the banana companies :)

I guess that gets to the semantics of what a "banana" is. You can't breed the plant that produces the fruit we buy in stores. Clearly there are ancestors that could reproduce. Yes, it might be possible to recover most of the traits of a commercial banana by breeding them. But it's never been done, so I don't see where the "This is incorrect" bit comes from.

> You can't breed a banana.

Sure you can. Only 15% of bananas grown for food are the sterile cavendish type. There are many many other types.

You most certainly can unless you are a greedy, lazy producer who can't be bothered to do the same time consuming painstaking breeding and selection that has gone on for centuries with other more common crops and simply picks one and clones the hell out of it globally almost certainly ensuring that it's going to meet something that will kill it off entirely due to the lack of genetic diversity.

Few things on earth are as weak and helpless as a cloned monocrop.

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