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The Banana As We Know It Is Dying Again
- 1_player 9y agoI'll once again post this Damn Interesting article about banana varieties: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-...
- kwindla 9y agoThe Flexport folks published a blog post last year on the coming banana apocalypse: https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-banana/ https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-banana/ It's really worth reading. (There's lots of great stuff on the Flexport blog.)
- MechEStudent 9y agoI see these at a cadence that works with price engineering. I don't believe it. I think it is like "ham supply is constrained this easter" and then they mark up the prices and there are the same number of hams. They were engineering the market, not presenting an actual problem. This looks like that.
- nkozyra 9y agoSkepticism is a great trait, but it should be your catalyst, not your conclusion. The article(s) showing this have numbers that support the claim, not to mention the history of previous cultivars' demise via similar mechanisms. Do you have something to the contrary?
- mikeash 9y agoHow were you able to tell that there were the same number of hams?
- CapitalistCartr 9y agoPast HN entries on the Cavendish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12263727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12263727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653220
- outsidetheparty 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918
- yarg 9y agoI'd be disinclined to refer to Cavendish as a cultivar, let alone a species; they are clones, copied not bred - what sickens one will sicken them all.
- maxerickson 9y agoWhat makes a cultivar though? (the clones obviously belong to some species) On one side, the consistent fruit makes a cultivar. What's the other side?
- foxhop 9y agoMy understanding is how they reproduce. A cultivar reproduces "sexually", and is "true to seed". If you plant the seed you get the same or very similar plant (which produces the same seeds). To clone is to trick an organism to divide into two or more organisms. This means they have the same strengths and weaknesses because they have nearly the same genes. Cloning can be done by rooting cuttings of a plant or attaching a cutting of a desirable plant to a root stock of a less desirable version (or a version with qualities like limited height to keep the tree small)
- maxerickson 9y agoBananas self clone, growing horizontal roots that turn into whole banana plants. So they do propagate themselves.
- foxhop 9y agoApparently bananas as we know them are a mostly sterile hybrid of two other trees. They self propagate like you say (but humans also spread them around). Bananas have a near zero rate of sexual reproduction, if you can get one to produce a seed, it's viability is low. If you can get the seed to germinate, the resulting "offspring" from that will be distinct from the original banana, a new variety. It will not necessarily be "true to seed". It might be a better banana, or worse. If you plant a lettuce seed you will get the same lettuce, year over year. Same with peppers and tomatoes, etc. Their traits were bred instead of cloned.
- huac 9y agoIs there anywhere that one can get the Gros Michel? I vaguely remember the bananas I ate in Asia tasting different.
- amyjess 9y agoIIRC, they're still produced in Thailand, so depending on the part of Asia you were in, you may have already had it.
- mattparlane 9y agoCorrect, I'm living in Thailand currently and the local bananas all look very much like Gros Michels. They taste great to me and are super cheap, very good joules per money.
- sshanky 9y agoWhat is stopping us from reverting to the Gros Michel? I wonder if it could be planted in places where the Cavendish now grows.
- sliverstorm 9y agoThe TR1 fungus is still lurking, waiting for its victim to return.
- scythe 9y agoThis Fusarium situation almost seems like timing an economic collapse. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been reading articles about the coming bananapocalypse since grade school. So maybe we should be convinced it's going to happen, but when? Next year? Next decade? 2045?
- swsieber 9y agoWould it be possible to grow bananas locally from the seed tip (provided you have a controlled growing environment)? Also, seeing as these are clones.... Is there any way to breed this species of banana for more variety.
- marcosdumay 9y agoSome varieties of banana do rarely breed. IFAIK, cavendish doesn't. I just don't get why people want to import only that variety. It's not great any any way besides being easy to package. Transportation is quite fast nowadays, it shouldn't be that big a problem.
- maxerickson 9y agoIt's not people, it's "the system". Faster transportation costs more and they have to be shipped before they are ripe and then triggered to ripen in time for sale. And then while they are for sale they probably do better if they are attractive and consistent and known by the consumer.
- chriskanan 9y agoI managed to get a banana cultivar called an ice cream banana [1] at a farmer's market in Oahu, Hawaii. It was the best banana I've ever had. I wish there was more of a willingness to explore selling a wider variety of bananas. We have 5-10 kinds of apples in my local grocery store in New York and the same is true for the other US states I've lived (including Oklahoma). 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana
- abtinf 9y agoHere in Washington state, I've found that small grocers focused on Vietnamese and Asian markets often carry a variety of bananas. They are amazing both in texture and taste.
- autokad 9y agoyou can get those at asian super markets in most cities. They are ok, they kind of have a more of a 'berry' taste and the 'banana' taste is much weaker.
- nabeards 9y agoI think a lot of that happens due to the length of time a fruit is ripe (and, specifically, tastes good) and how hardy it is to ship.
- maxerickson 9y agoMost of the grocery store apples are awful though. And they've really pushed it in recent years (warehousing the apples for a long time, reducing the average quality). Or maybe I've gotten more picky. But some of the newer varieties, in season, are just delicious.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoA disproportionate number of the apples in the grocery store have MacIntosh in their ancestry and are basically variants of them. There's not a wide variety of genetic diversity among eating apples, despite apples having a couple milennia of breeding history, a huge number of varieties (historical and current), and fairly diverse genetics. Consumers seem have a fairly narrow palette in what they consider to be a good eating apple.
- abtinf 9y agoI've seen this story about the Cavendish banana for close to 20 years now. I think the first time was on Slashdot in the late nineties or early aughts. Every time, the article predicts the imminent death of the varietal. The articles always make a persuasive case. So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out?
- marcosdumay 9y agoPeople have gone to great lengths to stop the propagation of the disease. Up to the point that entire fields are destroyed, and lands abandoned (for bananas) for years.
- ethbro 9y ago> So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out? This article makes the point. The fungus has no quick propogation methods, as it's only spread by moving infected earth: it's simply very resilient once established. So the last X years have been a slow motion "We know this is a problem. It's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Eventually it will be an insurmountable problem." The article also notes that there were a substantial number of "flex years" the last time this happened, as deforestation was used to open up new, un-infected land for banana cultivation. In summary: it's like the IPv6 problem. We knew it was coming, but resource exhaustion takes time.
- jeron 9y agoI love how a parallel can be drawn between bananas and IPV6
- rev_null 9y agoInedible Plantains Version 6?
- wildflowero 9y agoInnocuous Plantains Version 6.
- nabeards 9y agoI'll be watching this closely as a precursor of more damage to come. If the fungus is able to make it from Southeast Asia to the Americas, then the rubber plants in Southeast Asia may soon fall to the South American leaf blight. That would cause the complete destruction of the global natural rubber market. Excellent additional reading in Growing American Rubber by Mark R. Finlay.
- inferiorhuman 9y agoAlso, Fordlandia.
- rorykoehler 9y agoIn south east Asia we get many different types of banana. I've come to prefer many of the less sweet varieties. If the Cavendish goes extinct my hope would be that we stop this mono-culture nonsense and embrace variety much like we have with apples etc.
- madez 9y agoIn South America you can also get a variety of bananas. I was surprised by how different bananas can taste. I'd really like to be able to buy them at supermarkets (in Germany/Europe), but you rarely get offered any type besides Cavendish and maybe cooking bananas, but that is just the tip of the iceberg of banana variety.
- gumby 9y agoThis was a big disappointment for me in moving to North America — how little variety there is in the grocery stores, and how bland the tastes. Actually I’m overstating it — there’s lots of variety in engineered food sounds like breakfast cereals (though interestingly not in potato chip flavors) but the fruit and veggie choices in the supermarkets are pretty limited and boring.
- frozenport 9y agoIts a money thing, Americans are used to paying less for food compared to Western Europeans. When you start paying European rates you get the variety.
- tallanvor 9y agoTry moving to Norway and then tell me you think that the selection in North America has little variety!
- kenfox 9y agoNorth America is a large place. There are at least a half dozen different climates. Michigan has excellent variety with apples, peaches and cherries for example, but bananas are limited to Dole or Chiquita's Cavendish. Perhaps the availability of local fruit suppresses demand for banana variety. I've only seen more choices of banana in larger cities and university towns.
- 21 9y agoIt seems like there is a single exact fungus which is causing the trouble. Can someone explain why it is not possible to create some sort of targeted fungus killer, maybe using something like CRISPR?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoMaybe it is, but CRISPR (as a method of genetic engineering) is like... 3 years old? These things take time. Also, there's crazy-level opposition among general population for anything that puts genetic engineering and food in the same sentence, so this is probably a big reason why it isn't going to happen (at least not until most bananas die off, and the price goes through the roof).
- mathw 9y agoPossibly because... 1) It's really hard and we just don't know how yet 2) Creating an engineered biological weapon and releasing it into the environment just might have some unintended consequences when it starts interacting with all the things out there which could cause it to mutate I doubt our understanding of biology is strong enough to be sure that we could do something like that without causing major problems. It would, possibly, be more viable to construct an altered version of the fungus itself which could outcompete the one that kills the bananas, which is the kind of approach that has been investigated for controlling other pests such as mosquitos (although in that case they engineer mosquitos which produce sterile female offspring but viable males, so the males keep breeding and producing more sterile females... eventually you run out of fertile females and tada! No more mosquitos).
- jhiska 9y agoThis story again? This is bananas!
- dimecyborg 9y agoThe article seems to promote lab grown method of planting over shoot from parent based method. Ideally the shoot from plants would be much better because if one plantation gets affected it might not affect the other plantations as they are not shared and there is a vast distribution of the same variety.
- tw1010 9y agoThe fact that this was a story, then stopped being a story, and is now a thing again, with no interaction on my end, makes me sleep much better at night. Stop caring about the variables you can't control, and you'll live a better life. There were even people who prospered when world war II happened. Bernard Russell said that WWII was one of the best times of his life, personally.
- natecavanaugh 9y agoI also wonder, if in addition to looking at genetically modifying the banana to be resistant, what about modifying the fungus so that a strain is symbiotic with the banana and instead of killing it's host, it was able to keep going because the host isn't killed? That's all very hand wavy, but I was thinking, might not another alternative be modifying the enemy (bacteria or virus) so that there is a selective weight to a more beneficial alternate bacteria? Of course, any part of humans trying to manage the food supply, or nature in general, will have unintended downstream consequences, but I wonder if there are some other ways to approach the problem. Also, of commercial bananas don't replicate via seeds, why do they have seeds at all?
- djsumdog 9y agoI remember when I was in Australia a few years back, a friend told me the government was running an entire campaign to destroy banana plans because they got this thing that led to spots on the banana. But my friend said it didn't hurt the plant or reduce the lifespan of the banana. But the government started slashing people's plants on their own property to eradicate it. The whole thing was funded by banana farms and forced people to buy from farms rather than grown their own. I don't think that's what the article is referring to, but do any Australians here remember that campaign? What was that specific disease?
- endymi0n 9y agoAll ethical thoughts aside for a moment (most of this article actually made me sad), is there any remaining strain of the Gros Michel? Seems to me from the articles’ tone like the Cavendish was more of an inferior stopgap solution. If we start genetic fixing bananas, doesn‘t it make sense to start on the „better model“?
- meddlepal 9y agoThe Gros Michel isn't extinct AFAIK so... yes, there are existing strains. I guess the better question is what does "better" mean to the consumer? Tastes "better"? Looks "better?" These are subjective traits and consumers are so used to the Cavendish now that if the look, feel and taste isn't similar enough you might have a problem.
- kalleboo 9y agoIf Wikipedia is to be believed, Gros Michel is still grown and consumed in Asia. It's the Central American plantations that were ravaged by disease, and that's where the US/Europe get their bananas from.
- adrianmonk 9y agoI think that's a great idea, but economically all the investment right now is probably in saving the Cavendish banana. Not only is that what modern customers are familiar with but it's also what the industry is set up to produce. However, it that succeeds, perhaps it will inspire people to duplicate the feat with the Big Mike / Gros Michel. And inspire investment to back that, both for profit potential from a "new" product and for insurance in case some new problem befalls the Cavendish. But I'd bet investors don't want to divide their efforts right now.
- wbillingsley 9y agohttps://abgc.org.au/2015/05/21/what-assistance-is-resistance/ https://abgc.org.au/2015/05/21/what-assistance-is-resistance... It seems the industry has been working on - - identifying "tolerant" varieties of Cavendish (there's more than one) - a GM fusarium-resistant Cavendish - management regimes for growing fusarium-tolerant crops in infested soil Looks like bananas won't be disappearing but could be becoming more expensive for a while.
- Karupan 9y agoAs an aside, I don’t really like the most common banana available in Australia. Growing up in the southern part of India, I distinctly remember 7 varieties which I haven’t seen elsewhere. If the death of the most common banana means others may become more commonly available, I’m all for it.
- knowThySelfx 9y agoI don't think people there care for Cavendish much anyway ;) It isn't considered at par with other varieties.
- cageface 9y agoThough Southeast Asia, where bananas originated, grows dozens of varieties of banana, the Cavendish is the only kind deemed acceptable for export. This is a pity because a lot of the bananas you see here in SE Asia are more flavorful than the Cavendish anyway. Industrial agriculture's need to produce identical, identifiable, marketable products year after year is responsible for some very destructive and fragile monocultures.
- knowThySelfx 9y agoYes indeed, a pity. The "export worthy" Cavendish is not considered worthy in local markets though.
- cageface 9y agoIt's kind of the Red Delicious of bananas. Somebody just needs to educate consumers about the alternatives.
- vkjv 9y agoThe changes in bananas over time are pretty fascinating. https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-...