It's kind of humiliating that we the great sentient race can't protect our bananas from some lowly fungus. I think we should get our act together. We've already lost a few rounds.
We've known this could happen for decades, just due to the way bananas are propagated. The same thing happened to the Gros Michel cultivar in the 1950s. Plantations will have to scramble to get up to speed on a new cultivar, and some people will go bankrupt.
It's even the same species of fungus. Back then they called it Panama Disease.
But now we have genetic technology. This fungal disease may spell the end of non-GMO bananas in supermarkets. If there were another natural cultivar resistant to the latest strain of the fungus, it would already be in use. It was a stroke of luck that they even found the Cavendish before bananas disappeared entirely from the food supply.
If the genetic engineering works out, can we go back to the Gros Michel cultivar? They were sweeter and much bigger than Cavendish.
Edit: The article mentions that the wild Asian banana Musa acuminata malaccensis seems to be resistant, but I'm betting they're small and/or not very tasty.
Edit2: aw man, this is addressed right at the bottom of the article. "For his part, Dale is trying to engineer Gros Michel bananas for resistance to the original Foc strain."
Wow - So are you saying this is a case for GMO (create a resistant banana) or against it (for killing biodiversity)?
It's a shame because bananas are very cheap. On the one hand they're cheap enough to double in cost and many can handle it. On the other hand, they're a cheap staple for low income folks.
There's no biodiversity in bananas. All Cavendish plants are sterile genetic clones.
It was the same for Gros Michel.
Edit: what more, GMO are not inherently bad.
Monsanto gave them a bad name, because of their commercial practice (terminator gene), and the catastrophic environmental consequences of glyphosate-resistant crops.
They can be used wisely. For example, did you know that the insulin diabetics use is produced by GM yeast?
Yes, but that's not the only way bananas propagate. The fruit is how genetic variability gets introduced, but they also develop shoots from the root system, which eventually grow into trees themselves.
I believe traditionally bananas are grown as the main trunk, then 2 baby shoots at differing maturity. Once the main stem has fruited, it is removed and the next one takes over, at which point another shoot is allowed to develop.
The extra shoots that are removed can be used to start another "family" elsewhere, but has the risk of spreading disease. These days tissue culturing is used, with a much lower risk of spreading disease.
I don't think there's a limit, as its part of the natural growth pattern of bananas. Some other species have similar habits - I believe there's an entire forest that is one plant - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
I don't think I'd have a problem with GMO that inserted genes from one Musa cultivar into another. You could find a natural strain with resistance, isolate the resistance genes, and insert them into the production monoculture strain in a manner that is impossible for traditional techniques to accomplish, because the production cultivars are seedless and triploid.
I am much less accomodating for inserting genes from a completely different kingdom, like the Bt gene and associated promoters. Also, since the triploid bananas are sterile, there is a smaller likelihood that the alterations will escape into the wild and ruin fertile diploid bananas.
The way "natural" is commonly defined is misleading. Humans are apes, mammals, animals. We're part of nature, and so is everything we create and produce.
I know which meaning of natural you are talking about and it would indeed include everything artificial, but I disagree that that is the common meaning of natural! I hear natural more often used to mean "not caused or created by humans". Isn't that the definition people usually have in mind?
> I hear natural more often used to mean "not caused or created by humans". Isn't that the definition people usually have in mind?
I find the common definition misleading, because it implies that humanity is not part of nature. It is technically false, and causes confusion in the mind of most people.
The "natural good, artificial bad" meme needs to die.
We're currently facing ecological problems of immense scale, and not having a proper basic mental model of the situation is detrimental.
This is a really silly argument. There is a wide variety of definitions of “nature”, which has gone through dramatic changes in its meaning though the centuries. Criticizing definitions you don’t like because the generally positive connotation of “nature” lets those definitions serve a rhetorical position that you disagree with is tilting at windmills.
In particular, the sense of “natural” having to do with something’s unaltered/innate condition – as compared to some result of human interference – dates back at least to Plato [well, there the word was the Greek phusis, whereas natura is the Latin word used to translate it, but you get the idea]. Or if you want examples in English, at least to Chaucer.
Note, if you want a much fuller idea of what “nature”/“natural” means and meant in the past, I highly recommend the CS Lewis book Studies in Words which devotes a 50 page chapter to comprehensively exploring the subject.
Plato's world view is completely backwards. A good example of the pitfalls of speculative onanism. His influence on occidental culture is still very pervasive, though, but anthropocentrism is as idiotic as geocentrism.
> ... the generally positive connotation of “nature”.
"Nature" is inherently hostile (see Thermodynamics, 2nd law). What's currently marketed as "natural" is a carefully vetted subset, the result of thousands of years of humanity influence on its environment.
As you mention, the definition of the word has been evolving. I think the current meaning is misleading. It causes people to reject man-made things arbitrarily, and, more generally, it perpetuates an anthropocentric view of the world.
Wishing it had (and advocating for) a saner definition is not silly.
Fine. You could find a fertile strain, either in the wild or as a result of traditional breeding practices. It's longer than "natural", but less ambiguous.
To my knowledge, some varieties of plantain are already resistant. So identify that gene complex, pop it into the infertile triploid Gros Michel, and let the cloning commence.
The problem here being that "normal" bananas have seeds in them, and the Cavendish and Gros Michel are specific hybrids that don't - so the only way to propagate is essentially cloning them (take a cutting and grow it) - lots and lots of identical plants.
Going back to a more "natural" system would involve a lot of variation in fruit crops, which means handling and processing costs would go up tremendously, likely leading to the same result: no bananas for most people.
One of the more sustainable solutions is to eat local - food that is locally grown, thus suited for your environment. However, this means that all those in temperate climates will (eventually) need to forgo tropical fruits... or grow them in glasshouses.
Not sure what the best approach would be here, but I'm fortunate enough to be in an area where you can grow bananas - so I'm trying my luck (Auckland, New Zealand)
They look much more like passionfruit, but with more solid fleshy material. I think the seeds are hard and inedible, but haven't ever seen them in real life...
Also the cultivated ones have been developed specifically for their transportability and shelf life, with the taste as a lower priority. Hmmm... wonder what those Gros Michel taste like?
I was surprised the first time I bit into a banana and it went crunch.
That particular variety had seeds about the size and hardness of cherry pits, but not as spherical, and several per bite.
It was still edible, but not particularly enjoyable to me.
Plantains are also not a good banana substitute - they are much more starchy than bananas. Think halfway between banana and potato (though I probably haven't let them ripen enough - probably need to wait until the skin is black...)
Did you really say "sustainable" and "greenhouse" in the same paragraph?
It's MUCH more sustainable to grow them elsewhere and ship them than it is to grow in a greenhouse.
Local is NOT a sustainable way to grow food, because you end up growing plants that are not perfectly suited to the climate. It's much more sustainable to grow the best plant in the best place and ship them.
Yes - you caught me out there :) but what I had in mind was a small-scale greenhouse - the kind you have in your garden, not the commercial-scale kind. But this brings back the restricted scale that we'd end up with if mass-produced long-distance transport bananas become non-viable.
What I mean with local IS growing plants suited for the climate. So in most cases, tropical is out, unless you can take advantage of specific areas that may have a generally warmer micro-climate to grow these foods. But this implies small scale, as otherwise you'd have to put in acres of greenhouses, at which point shipping may well be a better option.
The thing about our current system is that it is efficient, making long-distance shipping feasible. However, it is not resilient, as it depends on politics and cheap energy. I'm not sure if I'd class that as sustainable just because that's how we've done it for the last 50 or so years...
But small scale is really really inefficient. I can't believe you recommend that as "sustainable" because it isn't. It relies on lots and lots of cheap land converted to farmland.
And just because you have lots of small greenhouses doesn't in anyway reduce the number of greenhouses - it just means you have to use more material to build them.
I can manage without tropical food, but do you think people in florida can manage without wheat?
Local is an ecological disaster. It's one of the ultimate forms of greenwashing because there is absolutely nothing "green" about it. They cut out a tiny bit of energy for shipping and replace it with just huge amounts of energy for everything else. Not to mention land and fertilizer.
> current system .... not sure if I'd class that as sustainable
It's more sustainable than any other alternative. The thing about our current system is that we use it because it's the best option we have.
It's very easy to prove that: Energy, fertilizer, land, etc cost money. Ergo the cheapest option is the one that uses the least of those. And the cheapest option is the one people naturally gravitate toward.
At best you can try to shift the costs, i.e. rather than spend energy, spend fertilizer; rather than pay for pesticides pay for spoiled food, etc. And if that is your goal then the current price structure may not match your ideal. (Since people optimize based on the current costs of those things, not your particular ideal cost for those things.)
This is basically what Organic food is: people believe that pesticides are too cheap, so they value them as more expensive and then the resulting food costs more.
But do not try to claim local is more efficient - because what input are you optimizing there? It's certainly not energy, land, pesticides or fertilizer.
I don't think anyone is surprised. But it's happening and is a good lesson in biodiversity, genetics, international trade, food pandemics, food sourcing, and history for anyone interested.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
If GMOs can get a win with this, citrus greening disease in oranges, or vitamin A-fortified "golden" rice it will be a big deal for public acceptance of the technology.
Not to diminish the downsides of this, but I really can't get enough of the wide variety of tiny bananas I get to eat when in Asia. You can find them occasionally here in the US, but they seem low on the import priority list. Wouldn't mind seeing more diversity in the banana department. There's a whole world of deliciousness we rarely see.
None of them handle all of: being picked early, being shipped, sitting in a supermarket display, and being bagged. That's why there's only one cultivar in US supermarkets in the first place.
> That's why there's only one cultivar in US supermarkets in the first place.
Well, except that I've been in several US supermarkets with more than one cultivar. (I think red and apple bananas are the most common non-Cavendish ones, excluding plantains, I've seen.)
48 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadIt's even the same species of fungus. Back then they called it Panama Disease.
But now we have genetic technology. This fungal disease may spell the end of non-GMO bananas in supermarkets. If there were another natural cultivar resistant to the latest strain of the fungus, it would already be in use. It was a stroke of luck that they even found the Cavendish before bananas disappeared entirely from the food supply.
Edit: The article mentions that the wild Asian banana Musa acuminata malaccensis seems to be resistant, but I'm betting they're small and/or not very tasty.
Edit2: aw man, this is addressed right at the bottom of the article. "For his part, Dale is trying to engineer Gros Michel bananas for resistance to the original Foc strain."
It's a shame because bananas are very cheap. On the one hand they're cheap enough to double in cost and many can handle it. On the other hand, they're a cheap staple for low income folks.
It was the same for Gros Michel.
Edit: what more, GMO are not inherently bad.
Monsanto gave them a bad name, because of their commercial practice (terminator gene), and the catastrophic environmental consequences of glyphosate-resistant crops.
They can be used wisely. For example, did you know that the insulin diabetics use is produced by GM yeast?
I believe traditionally bananas are grown as the main trunk, then 2 baby shoots at differing maturity. Once the main stem has fruited, it is removed and the next one takes over, at which point another shoot is allowed to develop.
The extra shoots that are removed can be used to start another "family" elsewhere, but has the risk of spreading disease. These days tissue culturing is used, with a much lower risk of spreading disease.
Why they are cheap is interesting: http://freakonomics.com/2008/06/19/the-economics-of-bananas/
I am much less accomodating for inserting genes from a completely different kingdom, like the Bt gene and associated promoters. Also, since the triploid bananas are sterile, there is a smaller likelihood that the alterations will escape into the wild and ruin fertile diploid bananas.
The way "natural" is commonly defined is misleading. Humans are apes, mammals, animals. We're part of nature, and so is everything we create and produce.
Artificial is a subset of natural.
I find the common definition misleading, because it implies that humanity is not part of nature. It is technically false, and causes confusion in the mind of most people.
The "natural good, artificial bad" meme needs to die.
We're currently facing ecological problems of immense scale, and not having a proper basic mental model of the situation is detrimental.
In particular, the sense of “natural” having to do with something’s unaltered/innate condition – as compared to some result of human interference – dates back at least to Plato [well, there the word was the Greek phusis, whereas natura is the Latin word used to translate it, but you get the idea]. Or if you want examples in English, at least to Chaucer.
Note, if you want a much fuller idea of what “nature”/“natural” means and meant in the past, I highly recommend the CS Lewis book Studies in Words which devotes a 50 page chapter to comprehensively exploring the subject.
> ... the generally positive connotation of “nature”.
"Nature" is inherently hostile (see Thermodynamics, 2nd law). What's currently marketed as "natural" is a carefully vetted subset, the result of thousands of years of humanity influence on its environment.
As you mention, the definition of the word has been evolving. I think the current meaning is misleading. It causes people to reject man-made things arbitrarily, and, more generally, it perpetuates an anthropocentric view of the world.
Wishing it had (and advocating for) a saner definition is not silly.
Why do you think it is "tilting at windmills" for me to want the definition to change to something that pleases me?
To my knowledge, some varieties of plantain are already resistant. So identify that gene complex, pop it into the infertile triploid Gros Michel, and let the cloning commence.
Going back to a more "natural" system would involve a lot of variation in fruit crops, which means handling and processing costs would go up tremendously, likely leading to the same result: no bananas for most people.
One of the more sustainable solutions is to eat local - food that is locally grown, thus suited for your environment. However, this means that all those in temperate climates will (eventually) need to forgo tropical fruits... or grow them in glasshouses.
Not sure what the best approach would be here, but I'm fortunate enough to be in an area where you can grow bananas - so I'm trying my luck (Auckland, New Zealand)
What's so bad about banana seeds? Are they hard like in grapes?
Also the cultivated ones have been developed specifically for their transportability and shelf life, with the taste as a lower priority. Hmmm... wonder what those Gros Michel taste like?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana
That particular variety had seeds about the size and hardness of cherry pits, but not as spherical, and several per bite.
It was still edible, but not particularly enjoyable to me.
Plantains are also not a good banana substitute - they are much more starchy than bananas. Think halfway between banana and potato (though I probably haven't let them ripen enough - probably need to wait until the skin is black...)
It's MUCH more sustainable to grow them elsewhere and ship them than it is to grow in a greenhouse.
Local is NOT a sustainable way to grow food, because you end up growing plants that are not perfectly suited to the climate. It's much more sustainable to grow the best plant in the best place and ship them.
What I mean with local IS growing plants suited for the climate. So in most cases, tropical is out, unless you can take advantage of specific areas that may have a generally warmer micro-climate to grow these foods. But this implies small scale, as otherwise you'd have to put in acres of greenhouses, at which point shipping may well be a better option.
The thing about our current system is that it is efficient, making long-distance shipping feasible. However, it is not resilient, as it depends on politics and cheap energy. I'm not sure if I'd class that as sustainable just because that's how we've done it for the last 50 or so years...
And just because you have lots of small greenhouses doesn't in anyway reduce the number of greenhouses - it just means you have to use more material to build them.
I can manage without tropical food, but do you think people in florida can manage without wheat?
Local is an ecological disaster. It's one of the ultimate forms of greenwashing because there is absolutely nothing "green" about it. They cut out a tiny bit of energy for shipping and replace it with just huge amounts of energy for everything else. Not to mention land and fertilizer.
> current system .... not sure if I'd class that as sustainable
It's more sustainable than any other alternative. The thing about our current system is that we use it because it's the best option we have.
It's very easy to prove that: Energy, fertilizer, land, etc cost money. Ergo the cheapest option is the one that uses the least of those. And the cheapest option is the one people naturally gravitate toward.
At best you can try to shift the costs, i.e. rather than spend energy, spend fertilizer; rather than pay for pesticides pay for spoiled food, etc. And if that is your goal then the current price structure may not match your ideal. (Since people optimize based on the current costs of those things, not your particular ideal cost for those things.)
This is basically what Organic food is: people believe that pesticides are too cheap, so they value them as more expensive and then the resulting food costs more.
But do not try to claim local is more efficient - because what input are you optimizing there? It's certainly not energy, land, pesticides or fertilizer.
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.
https://www.commondreams.org/views03/0719-02.htm
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).
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 :)
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).
Sure you can. Only 15% of bananas grown for food are the sterile cavendish type. There are many many other types.
Few things on earth are as weak and helpless as a cloned monocrop.
Well, except that I've been in several US supermarkets with more than one cultivar. (I think red and apple bananas are the most common non-Cavendish ones, excluding plantains, I've seen.)
This makes the risk very high for such things, it is surprising that we have gone this long with out issues coming up sooner and more frequently.