4 ms·

What’s Wrong with Bananas

69 points by dnetesn 8y ago

quixoticelixer- 8y ago
"Because most important crops reproduce only by sexual seed, they cannot be clonally propagated. " This is entirely wrong, many important crops (infact all) can be clonally propogated and many are.
- bloak 8y ago
  Perhaps the reasoning is that the most important crops are grains/cereals, and they are propagated sexually. Or am I wrong about that? (I fail at biology.) Culinary fruits, on the other hand, perhaps they are mostly cloned.
  - Laforet 8y ago
    Some crops such as common bananas and sugar cane are sterile as they produce no viable seeds, so both have to be clonally propagated by planting cuttings. 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.
    - senorjazz 8y ago
      > so both have to be clonally propagated by planting cuttings 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
- jdmichal 8y ago
  Most fruiting trees are cloned by grafting with rootstock. As the article says, sexual reproduction produces variance, and for many fruits we barely have them tamed. Sexually produced apples tend to be crab apples. Planting your Haas avocado seed will probably give you edible fruit, but nothing like a Haas.
  - senorjazz 8y ago
    > Planting your Haas avocado seed will probably give you edible fruit, but nothing like a Haas. 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
  - quixoticelixer- 8y ago
    Grafting and cuttings are a form of sexual reproduction.
    - jdmichal 8y ago
      Cuttings and grafting are both clonal reproduction. They are by definition asexual, because there is no recombinant chromosomes. Grafting to rootstock creates a genetic chimera. It does not mix chromosomes at all.
n4r9 8y ago
Bananas can be a good example to get people thinking more carefully about agriculture and spin. 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.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention 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.
- HyruleanHero 8y ago
  I found an apple tree on an island in the middle of a lake once, while out kayaking. It had apparently been there for quite some time, completely untended to by human hands. I was excited to try a "natural" apple, for whatever reason I had the idea that it would be tastier than store bought apples. I regretted biting into it pretty much immediately. It was my first lesson on the importance of artificial selection in the palatability of our produce. 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.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    This isn't strictly accurate. 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.
dannyfraser 8y ago
There was a good read on this in the most recent issue of Wired UK as well: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-gene-editing https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-...
- dang 8y ago
  Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192671 Among many: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194173. The banana is dying and the suit is back!
crazygringo 8y ago
> A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade. 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&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS717US717&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiBve_b-rXeAhWkhOAKHVIoDTMQ_AUIEygB&biw=1152&bih=638&dpr=2.5#imgrc=UD5y_sNiMOPQQM https://www.google.com/search?q=tipos+de+bananas&safe=off&rl...:
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Same when I visit the Far East, lots of varieties, and available actually ripe to eat (in the UK they are now all so under-ripe in stores that by the time they are ripened they've also started to rot. 20 years ago you could get bananas that were actually ripening, now you probably can't eat one without some "ugh, tastes under-ripe"). 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.
- scarecrowbob 8y ago
  I'm in Texas, and I only have anecdotes not data. 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.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Another data point: I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I've seen at least three varieties in my local stores: The Cavendish, something larger and starchier which is sold as "Plantain" which turns black when ripe, and sometimes smaller finger sized varieties that are red in color.
devmacrile 8y ago
The NYT had a great piece a few years back of a similar bent but w.r.t. oranges: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-th.... Definitely influenced how I think about this type of issue and is worth a read as well.
sparrc 8y ago
Not sure I'm really following the problem this article is trying to warn about. 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?
- Afforess 8y ago
  I think the article strayed a bit far into metaphor, but the core story is about the red queen hypothesis. 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.
monster_group 8y ago
Can somebody post the TLDR version of this? I started reading with genuine interest but the author takes too long to get to the point. I am not even sure what the point is.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Gros Michel was the main banana variety that accounted for some very large proportion of commercial production several decades ago. Disease wiped out most of them and made it uneconomical to produce so everybody switched to Cavendish variety, and there's a disease for that one now too. 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

69 points by dnetesn 8y ago

"Because most important crops reproduce only by sexual seed, they cannot be clonally propagated. " This is entirely wrong, many important crops (infact all) can be clonally propogated and many are.

bloak 8y ago
Perhaps the reasoning is that the most important crops are grains/cereals, and they are propagated sexually. Or am I wrong about that? (I fail at biology.) Culinary fruits, on the other hand, perhaps they are mostly cloned.
- Laforet 8y ago
  Some crops such as common bananas and sugar cane are sterile as they produce no viable seeds, so both have to be clonally propagated by planting cuttings. 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.
  - senorjazz 8y ago
    > so both have to be clonally propagated by planting cuttings 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
jdmichal 8y ago
Most fruiting trees are cloned by grafting with rootstock. As the article says, sexual reproduction produces variance, and for many fruits we barely have them tamed. Sexually produced apples tend to be crab apples. Planting your Haas avocado seed will probably give you edible fruit, but nothing like a Haas.
- senorjazz 8y ago
  > Planting your Haas avocado seed will probably give you edible fruit, but nothing like a Haas. 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
- quixoticelixer- 8y ago
  Grafting and cuttings are a form of sexual reproduction.
  - jdmichal 8y ago
    Cuttings and grafting are both clonal reproduction. They are by definition asexual, because there is no recombinant chromosomes. Grafting to rootstock creates a genetic chimera. It does not mix chromosomes at all.

n4r9 8y ago

Bananas can be a good example to get people thinking more carefully about agriculture and spin. 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.

saagarjha 8y ago
> food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention 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.
HyruleanHero 8y ago
I found an apple tree on an island in the middle of a lake once, while out kayaking. It had apparently been there for quite some time, completely untended to by human hands. I was excited to try a "natural" apple, for whatever reason I had the idea that it would be tastier than store bought apples. I regretted biting into it pretty much immediately. It was my first lesson on the importance of artificial selection in the palatability of our produce. 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.
- Jedd 8y ago
  This isn't strictly accurate. 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.

dannyfraser 8y ago

There was a good read on this in the most recent issue of Wired UK as well: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-gene-editing https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-...

dang 8y ago
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192671 Among many: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194173. The banana is dying and the suit is back!

crazygringo 8y ago

> A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade. 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&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS717US717&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiBve_b-rXeAhWkhOAKHVIoDTMQ_AUIEygB&biw=1152&bih=638&dpr=2.5#imgrc=UD5y_sNiMOPQQM https://www.google.com/search?q=tipos+de+bananas&safe=off&rl...:

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Same when I visit the Far East, lots of varieties, and available actually ripe to eat (in the UK they are now all so under-ripe in stores that by the time they are ripened they've also started to rot. 20 years ago you could get bananas that were actually ripening, now you probably can't eat one without some "ugh, tastes under-ripe"). 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.
scarecrowbob 8y ago
I'm in Texas, and I only have anecdotes not data. 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.
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
Another data point: I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I've seen at least three varieties in my local stores: The Cavendish, something larger and starchier which is sold as "Plantain" which turns black when ripe, and sometimes smaller finger sized varieties that are red in color.

devmacrile 8y ago

The NYT had a great piece a few years back of a similar bent but w.r.t. oranges: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-th.... Definitely influenced how I think about this type of issue and is worth a read as well.

sparrc 8y ago

Not sure I'm really following the problem this article is trying to warn about. 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?

Afforess 8y ago
I think the article strayed a bit far into metaphor, but the core story is about the red queen hypothesis. 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.

monster_group 8y ago

Can somebody post the TLDR version of this? I started reading with genuine interest but the author takes too long to get to the point. I am not even sure what the point is.

colechristensen 8y ago
Gros Michel was the main banana variety that accounted for some very large proportion of commercial production several decades ago. Disease wiped out most of them and made it uneconomical to produce so everybody switched to Cavendish variety, and there's a disease for that one now too. 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