
The Cavendish Banana Will Soon Be Gone - pmcpinto
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/humans-made-banana-perfect-soon-itll-gone/
======
noer
I feel like I've read the same article about the decline of the Gros Michel,
the rise of the Cavendish and the eminent extinction of the Cavendish at least
once a year for 10 years.

~~~
nakedrobot2
So... we will "just" start using another one of the hundreds of varieties of
bananas, right? I guess the Cavendish is particularly interesting from an
industrial point of view, but for that same reason, probably isn't the nicest-
tasting one anyway? Can any banana connoisseurs chime in here?

------
andrewla
Putting aside the hysteria of the impending extinction of the Cavendish (which
so far seems to be at a stalemate), this situation is not unique to bananas.

Pretty much all fruit trees used in agriculture are produced by cloning;
generally speaking producing excess fruit is not a productive mutation for a
plant, especially when the fruit is high calorie. So to a good approximation,
fruit trees grown from seed are extremely unlikely to bear enough fruit to be
useful.

Sweet bananas are the example used here, but pretty much all fruit trees share
this. There's essentially one (two if you count Dwarf Cavendish) sweet banana
-- all sweet bananas you find in a store will be clones of one of those two.
Same for avocados -- exactly two genetically identical sources of avocados (at
commercial scale; a wild avocado tree will produce some small number of
avocados every couple of years). Apples have a much greater variety of
cultivars, but every Red Delicious you eat comes from a tree that is a genetic
clone of all the others.

There's a danger from monocultures in agriculture in general, but at least for
plants grown from seed, there's some natural genetic variety that might yield
resistance from large-scale blights. Fruit trees are much more vulnerable to
this sort of problem.

~~~
username223
> Pretty much all fruit trees used in agriculture are produced by cloning

I was surprised some years ago when I learned that most apple trees are
grafts: you take a branch from a tree with apples you like, attach it to a
shoot of some other apple tree, and it will produce the apples you like. A
neighbor's tree had burned down, and he had no idea what sort of apples the
shoots sprouting from the stump would produce.

~~~
nikcub
Planet Money had a great episode on a farmer who created a new type of apple:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episode-627-the-
miracle-apple)

~~~
username223
Honeycrisp, right? It has been awhile since I listened to it, but IIRC the
interesting part was the creator's efforts to protect the apple's flavor by
trademarking the name. Most new varieties are bred for looks, yield, and shelf
life at the expense of taste. (Remember when Fujis were good?)

------
zymhan
This is not new, nor is it imminent.

[http://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/138610585/yes-we-do-have-
banan...](http://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/138610585/yes-we-do-have-bananas-for-
now)

------
timcederman
FYI - you can still find the Gros Michel banana. You can buy your own plant
off Amazon if you like ([https://www.amazon.com/Gros-Michel-Banana-Plant-
Variety/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/Gros-Michel-Banana-Plant-
Variety/dp/B0094JDSAC)). I grew up regular eating the still-available lady
finger banana, which really does taste much much better than the Cavendish. I
also love eating apple bananas when I'm in Hawaii.

My point being saying it will be "gone" is likely hyperbole. It may end up
being less cheaply and readily available, but there are efforts in place now
to find its successor which has similar qualities, but is resistant to the
numerous problems facing the Cavendish. At this point it looks most likely to
be the Goldfinger banana -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana).

------
marcoperaza
The article is a good read but I really hate the repeated assertions that
clones are all part of the same single organism. That's just not true--that's
not how "organism" is defined. The analogy they use to justify it, the ant
colony, is just as inaccurate; each ant is an individual organism. Perhaps I'm
being pedantic, but there's someone out there walking away from this article
with a terrible misunderstanding of what an "organism" is. Science journalism
should be about informing, not misinforming.

~~~
Udo
The article with all its inaccuracies and misleading language felt like it was
written in pursuit of a somewhat manipulative agenda. When I got to the end
and read the book it's excerpted from it, it made sense: " _Never Out of
Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply
and Our Future_ ".

At least the article makes an effort to blame monocultures, but instead of
proposing a better model for a more diversified agriculture, it implies that
current troubles are an inescapable result of post-industrial consumerism. But
I assert what we're seeing is a result of big agricultural companies'
unwillingness to change course on a model that was supposed to maximise
profits without any thought of long term viability - a phenomenon that is
currently slowly changing through consumer demand for more variety.

Increasing variety is the answer to the robustness problem. When I was a
child, there was precisely one type of tomato in the supermarket, and it
wasn't great. Today, I typically see more than five, and they all taste pretty
good. If I had five types of banana to choose from, that wouldn't be the end
of the world either (neither would be the banana dying out, for that matter).

"Having the Food We Want When We Want It" is a highly misleading premise.

~~~
steven777400
I'm not much of a banana guy, so I don't know if it's always been the case,
but at my local supermarket there are usually up to four varieties of bananas
to choose from, and always more than just one.

The usual big yellows take up the most display, of course, but they also have
red bananas, a small yellow variety, and the baking banana (for some reason
the name is escaping me at the moment, but these are well known).

------
chrischen
I hope stories like this bring to light the dangers of letting parents select
genes or traits in their kids. Humans tend to shoot themselves in the foot and
make poor predictive choices. They also tend to cluster, and if beauty trends
are any identifier, letting people select genes will inevitably lead to a
trend of less generic diversity among humans.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Your basic argument is the naturalistic fallacy, that "nature" "chooses" more
optimally than directed engineering can.

I wouldn't disagree that genetic diversity in plants and animals increase the
speed of survival and adaptability probabilities in aggregate. That is however
a significantly different argument than the goal of optimization which is what
parents are doing when they eg. select for an embryo without BRCA-1.

~~~
Ygg2
No. The "market"/"humans" doesn't choose optimally for long term survival.
They optimize for some parameter, which bears little to no correlation with
greater chances for survival.

You can see this everywhere, from tomatoes (and now even cherry tomatoes) that
taste like cardboard because producers optimize for pretty looks (which are
used to determine if the product is faulty); to bananas.

------
seunosewa
The inconvenience of having to switch to a new type of banana or coffee every
few decades is barely significant in my view. I don't see why we won't always
be able to replace the popular varieties that are wiped out by diseases. Seed
banks have been a thing for a very long time.

~~~
twoodfin
Agree. And if financial markets are working properly, the risk of disaster
should be priced in, affecting the cost of raising capital for growers and
giving them an incentive to plan alternatives.

~~~
scj
There should be two incentives. One is the monoculture risk mentioned earlier.
The second is that a viable alternative might be developed that is more
appealing than the current product.

------
lr4444lr
The aspect of human nature in this story that I least understand is why we're
so ready to pay cheaper base plus value-added costs for a seemingly infinite
variety of processed foods made from a very small set of basic ingredients,
instead of a higher base with no post-processing costs for a seemingly
infinite variety of natural foods at what might be the same grand total cost,
and better sustainability. Maybe modern life gets too chaotic, and people want
the comfort of reliable sensations in their food? I dunno... I can only speak
for myself, as I get excited to see new produce varietals in the supermarket.
Maybe others just prefer the new brand variations of junk foods.

~~~
Declanomous
I think it's disingenuous to call foods made from typical ingredients 'junk
food'. Your argument really only makes sense if you accept that cost of both
options would be similar. I highly doubt that is the case.

Even if you can provide a wide variety of unprocessed foods in to the
supermarket at the same cost you can provide processed foods in to the super
market, the cost would not be the same. Unprocessed foods, by their very
definition, require processing. The majority of food people eat is not raw. So
now I have to spend more time preparing food. Time isn't free.

Even if I'm already preparing food from scratch, you have to learn how to
prepare new varieties of food, even if they are marginally different. For
instance, I have bought new varieties of rice and sweet potatoes recently, and
each time I've had to do a fair amount of research on how to prepare them. And
rice and sweet potatoes are foods that I cook by themselves. Preparing a dish
with a completely new ingredient takes significantly more

That's not even accounting for economies of scale on the production side. The
produce that makes it to the supermarket is a small subset of all of the
produce grown. If you want your food to be inexpensive, what you purchase is
going to be affected by the demands of industrial food manufacturing. So there
might be 1000 types of potatoes in the world, but since McDonalds is only
buying one type, 50% of the potatoes grown could be of a single variety.

Plus the products that supermarkets stock are dictated by demand, spoilage,
and durability. So even if you want heirloom something-or-other, you might
find them extremely difficult to track down because they go bad too quickly in
a supermarket, or they bruise easily. They might even just look bad under
fluorescent light, who knows.

I'm not saying more variety isn't a good thing; I get excited when new product
varietals appear in my store. However I think it's extremely understandable
that supermarkets don't carry a wider variety of stock. If you are looking for
a wider variety, I've found that Hispanic produce stores and farmer's markets
always have a lot of produce that I don't even recognize.

------
hadrianpaulo
This is a real problem for my country (Philippines), especially for provinces
and agricultural companies that grow and sell Cavendish bananas. Banana
production and exports were lessened by at least 20% just last 2015 and it's
largely attributed to the Panama Wilt. Sadly, no solutions to cure the disease
exist right now even with years of multinational research.

------
riphay
For those who want to take a deep dive in the world of bananas, great article
about what different people are trying to do about the problem (from 2011):

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/we-have-no-
bana...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/we-have-no-bananas)

------
acjohnson55
I have to wonder if the advent of renewable energy and vertical farming could
eventually make these concerns extinct. I have a dream of a future world where
human population stabilizes (as it seems to be doing), and vertical farming
allows us to utilize far less land area (and maybe sea) for sustenance.
Closed-system farms seem like they could be much more robust against pests and
pathogens.

------
ianai
I'm pretty sure HN promotes these stories as a group exercise in critical
thinking and analysis.

------
valuearb
Bananas aren't even bananas. Wild bananas were nothing like what we eat today,
before humans started eating them and selecting them for our preferred traits.

------
Asooka
Here's the thing about Wired: I can't read it.

------
zitterbewegung
Is this a submarine post ? This article gets regurgitated every year .

~~~
StargazyPi
It was on the cover of the New Scientist 14 years ago!
[https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2378%20/](https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2378%20/)

~~~
ethagknight
They said it 'could be gone within 10 years' 14 years ago, and (I'm not an
economist, I could be thinking of this wrong) yet bananas are cheaper than
ever before when accounting for inflation. Not only that, the relative price
of bananas have held steady for 5 yrs now. These sorts of articles should
include a subtitle stating "... if nothing else is allowed to adapt or react
except for the threat mentioned in the article"

[http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=bananas&mon...](http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=bananas&months=240)

~~~
soperj
Pretty sure Sea Ice is the same, it was supposed to be gone a long time ago
(at least during the summer months). If you say anything about it though
people collectively lose their shit.

~~~
jes5199
well, sea ice is measurably smaller:
[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iqr_timeseries.png)

~~~
soperj
Not saying it isn't. Just that it was supposed to be gone, and it's still
closer to the levels in the late 70s than it is to gone even at it's lowest.

------
SlipperySlope
CRISPR to the rescue.

~~~
jedberg
I'm not sure if your comment is a joke or not, but it's not a bad idea. Find
one of the few remaining Gros Michels, edit it so that it is resistant to
Fusarium, and start growing them again.

And the same could be done with other monoculture crops. It then becomes an
arms race between scientists and viruses.

