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The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#161

Post by hammock »

neiman wrote: post #101
disillusioned wrote: post #96

Fun banana facts: Bananas are the most-sold item at most grocery stores and, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing…

> Bananas are the most-sold item at most grocery stores and, notably, Wal-Mart. In which country? The US? This can't be globally true..

Bananas are the first item in the store. Just based on how they are merchandised it would be easy to predict this. (I know it is more complicated than that, please don't reply with "loss leader")

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#162

Post by mlyle »

dragonwriter wrote: post #134
bipson wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't listen it seems: There is no commercially exploitable banana for export that we know of yet. Going from Gros Michel to Cavendish required rethinking how we farm, harvest, ship, ripen, sell bananas. Cavendish could simply not be shipped like Gros Michel before. You said yourself that Cavendish is a "boring" banana. This might be true. But all the great, tasty, small bananas you are talking about cannot be s…

> But all the great, tasty, small bananas you are talking about cannot be shipped anywhere by the means we know of today I'm fairly sure I've seen labelled-as-imported dwarf red and apple bananas in California, but certainly the transport properties of most plausible replacements by taste are inferior to Cavendish (and I don't even know if any of them are Panama disease resistant, and if they aren't, they aren't plau…

You can get small quantities at meh pricing of other bananas, too. The question is whether there's anything that can be produced and shipped in large quantities at reasonable cost, like the Cavendish.

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#163

Post by mlyle »

rwmj wrote: post #148
anfilt wrote: post #8

I find it weird that people would not like other variety of bananas. Like there are generally more than one type of apples, potatoes, onions, tomotoes, and lettuce at most grocery stores. I would like the choice.

When I was in Bali there were several varieties. They were smaller than Cavendish, but all were perfectly pleasant to eat so I wonder why we can't have those in the US and Europe.

Because they don't ship well-- skin thickness and ripening time. We can have them in the US and EU, but not at a reasonable cost.

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#164

Post by mlyle »

acd wrote: post #119

Cavendish banana are monoculture clones from the same original banana. That means that any disease that attacks one can attack all since the banana share the same dna and protective mechanism. The solution is not to clone with the same dna. also not to use pesticides which kills bees and insects. Pesticide will not only kill bugs they will kill all insects a like. “Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish…

The problem is that banana seeds are large and inedible and trying to eat a banana with seeds is very messy. Hence, triploid and cloning.

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#165

Post by mlyle »

bad_user wrote: post #53
jedberg wrote: post #28

> Other scientists—most notably, James Dale of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia—are testing genetically modified disease-resistant Cavendish bananas, but public acceptance of GMOs could prove a significant obstacle to their widespread adoption. This is the problem right here. The lack of science education. A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO", i…

> * A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO"* Not really. The difference is that selective breeding takes a lot of time and for the species that we eat today we've had hundreds to thousands of years to observe if it harms us or not. When new drugs or foods get approved for consumption, the tests being made are for how our body affect the eaten food, and the assessment…

It seems like your argument works in reverse. Selective breeding-- who knows what changes you're making to the underlying food. When I taste a "cotton candy grape", there's likely a whole lot of chemical difference from a normal grape, in mostly-unknown-ways.

Whereas with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of.

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#166

Post by mlyle »

ksaj wrote: post #37
echelon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patents are stopping variety from happening. Just like with corn, except things are worse with bananas. How can the patents not have already expired? Bananas have been the same roughly all of my life, unless I'm wildly misremembering. Surely there is no way the Cavendish is still protected by patents.

Mostly the damage is already done. But at least there are new cultivars coming out sooner or later. Here's one: https://patents.justia.com/patent/PP28625 But how new is it? As I've alluded (it would take a full article to really get into this), even this new cultivar is... Cavendish. And it's patented. Just like all the other Cavendish bananas that comprise the only bananas you can ever find unless you happen to live…

We used to have a Gros Michel monoculture, and now we have a Cavendish monoculture. There's not a great candidate for the "next" monoculture, in that TR4 affects all the varieties that ship well.

And bananas, because we want seedless varieties, favor cloning which favors monocultures (both directly because they're, you know, clones; through slow propagation which in turn makes scaling a variety pretty capital intensive, etc.)

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#167

Post by simonebrunozzi »

disillusioned wrote: post #96

Fun banana facts: Bananas are the most-sold item at most grocery stores and, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing…

> banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.

Thanks for sharing this. I've read a few things like this one, regarding "ripening centers" for various fruits, including apples and strawberries.

I am not sure that a banana stays "healthy" after going through a toxic gas - well, apparently the normal concentrations are not toxic to humans [0]: "Ethylene has been found not harmful or toxic to humans in the concentrations found in ripening rooms (100-150 ppm)."

Or maybe IT IS toxic after all? [1]. This is where a national medical/certification/food system should step in and clarify things for good.

[0]: https://www.catalyticgenerators.com/ethylene-c2h4/

[1]: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/MMG/MMG.asp?id=730&tid=133

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#168

Post by DennisP »

latchkey wrote: post #13
sn41 wrote: post #6

Bananas are the prime cautionary tale against monoculture. The number of native breeds which are now gone for the sake of promotion of one particular breed leads to less resilience against disease and pests. Just in my corner of India, there are various varieties. [1] However, in the U.S., the only variety you often get to see is the insipid Cavendish, whose only merit seems to be shelf-life. If you travel in the tro…

I currently live in Vietnam, but was recently traveling around Laos by motorbike. The bananas there are almost inedible... they taste awful. I found it fascinating how different they were compared with Vietnamese bananas. That said, I saw huge fields of farmed trees literally everywhere there (as well as in VN). I don't think they are in any real danger of disappearing like these articles say. It is very sensationali…

Are those Cavendish bananas in Vietnam? If they're another variety consumed locally, that wouldn't contradict the article's claims:

> Although thousands of banana varieties grow around the world, only a few have the precise characteristics necessary to withstand the rigors of large-scale commercial cultivation, long-distance transport, and international marketing. A banana with those characteristics, a taste and appearance similar to the beloved Cavendish, and resistance to TR4 does not exist.

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#169

Post by Shorel »

bipson wrote: post #132
mort96 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do bananas have to be seedless?

People hated the seedy variants. It was more seeds than fruit and messy to eat. Note: you could not eat the seeds it seems (large and hard)

There are a lot of sizes for the seeds. I have never seen the 'more seeds than fruit' you mention.

I do remember eating bananas where the seeds where all about 0.3 mm to 0.5 mm.

Re: The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America

#170

Post by coliveira »

sn41 wrote: post #6

Bananas are the prime cautionary tale against monoculture. The number of native breeds which are now gone for the sake of promotion of one particular breed leads to less resilience against disease and pests. Just in my corner of India, there are various varieties. [1] However, in the U.S., the only variety you often get to see is the insipid Cavendish, whose only merit seems to be shelf-life. If you travel in the tro…

This is something that got me surprised when I came to the US: every banana is the same kind. Back home I used to have several kinds of bananas, each kind tasting like real fruits. US bananas have a bland taste, and always seem like they're still green (which is the case, because they become ripe by chemical processes).
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