
What’s Wrong with Bananas - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/whats-wrong-with-bananas
======
n4r9
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.

~~~
HyruleanHero
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.

~~~
pingec
You have to stop the human intervention at the right moment though. In my
country there are maybe 10 apple varieties that are grown commercially and
they are surely tastier than their wild ancestors.

However, taste is just one of many criteria when deciding which apples to
grow. For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden
that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. They are also small, do not
produce regular quantities each year and prone to diseases. So they are not
viable for commercial use but still the best apple you have ever tasted if you
manage to find one.

So perhaps organic could also mean focusing on other criteria than growing
fruit that is most viable to grow in huge quantities, that is more resistant
to various diseases and other chemicals that kill insects/fungi, that look
beautiful and have a long shelf life and taste good enough.

~~~
colechristensen
I think we should stop using shallow adjectives to signal quality.

"organic" is just a marketing label.

Instead of trying to sort everything into two bins and decide how to gatekeep
"organic" how about we do science and education and labeling to teach people
the details of how their food is bred and produced and how quality and effects
vary.

~~~
strainer
Organic is not a marketing label - here[1] are the extra regulations which any
food labelled as organic in US must be certified to satisfy. These regulations
have been developed and studied for decades, here is one recent review [2]

[1][https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-
idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...](https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-
idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1025eb0e6b67cadf9d3b40&rgn=div6&view=text&node=7:3.1.1.9.32.7)

[2][https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-
sustaina...](https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-
sustainably.html)

------
crazygringo
> _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&rl...](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):

~~~
NeedMoreTea
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.

------
quixoticelixer-
"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.

~~~
jdmichal
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.

~~~
quixoticelixer-
Grafting and cuttings are a form of sexual reproduction.

~~~
jdmichal
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.

------
dannyfraser
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-...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-
gene-editing)

~~~
dang
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!

------
sparrc
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
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.

------
devmacrile
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-
th...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-
by-altering-its-dna.html). Definitely influenced how I think about this type
of issue and is worth a read as well.

------
monster_group
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
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

