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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

#181

Post by rhengles »

mlyle wrote: post #163
rwmj wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This leads me to think that the problem is not that "the banana" will disappear as a fruit globally, but that there will be no more a variety that is durable and cheap to transport around the world. So I think it's more a problem of international shipping than the extinction of a fruit.

Can't this be solved by improving the transportation of the less durable varieties?

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

#182

Post by simonebrunozzi »

trehalose wrote: post #180
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

Ethylene oxide is a completely different chemical from ethylene. They're as different as methane and formaldehyde. Ethylene oxide is an epoxide, a class of chemicals that are generally extremely reactive. Ethylene is a simple hydrocarbon.

Thanks for clarifying. I'm deeply ignorant, despite I loved studying Chemistry 20+ years ago.

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

#183

Post by disillusioned »

ashtonbaker wrote: post #152
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 aren't seasonal purchases like berries ... Fun fact, though - bananas ARE berries :)

Haha, fair point! I of course meant like summer berries like blueberries or strawberries. :-)

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

#184

Post by disillusioned »

apexalpha wrote: post #107
neiman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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..

I've heard this about Dutch stores as well. Supermarkets sell banana's at 0% margin or even a loss simply because it lures customers in.

Or, put another way, because they HAVE to sell them: if you're the grocery that _doesn't_ carry bananas, people will move their shop elsewhere.

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

#185

Post by disillusioned »

mieseratte wrote: post #138
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 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 activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that…

This was from a friend who worked adjacent predictive analytics for Prime Fresh, who was complaining to me about how frustrating bananas were to account for, but how they can't just exclude them because if you're not able to cover a substantial enough portion of the consumer's shop, then you're not doing their job, and they end up in a supermarket to complete the shop anyway, and you lose sales you would've otherwise had.

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

#186

Post by mlyle »

bad_user wrote: post #176
mlyle wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't work that way. Literally every fruit, legume and vegetable you're eating, that you're not hand picking from a forest, is the result of selective breeding and this has been going on since agriculture happened, from around year 10,000 BC at least. It's not perfect, since the selective breeding we've been doing has been for diluting the proteins and increasing the energy per acre. And there are still plenty o…

I'm just making a very simple argument: when David Cain cross-pollinated hundreds of thousands of grape plants to make a new flavor, there's a terrific amount of diversity and "newness" and some degree of opportunity for something slightly hazardous to be introduced.

Compare to someone making a CRISPR edit to alter a Cavendish protein to the form in other bananas that people have already been consuming in quantity for hundreds of years.

Why do you assess the former probability of harm to be so much lower than the latter?

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

#187

Post by mlyle »

rhengles wrote: post #181
mlyle wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This leads me to think that the problem is not that "the banana" will disappear as a fruit globally, but that there will be no more a variety that is durable and cheap to transport around the world. So I think it's more a problem of international shipping than the extinction of a fruit. Can't this be solved by improving the transportation of the less durable varieties?

Oh, of course. Bananas are not going extinct. There's still Gros Michel bananas like we "lost" before. They're just not commercially viable anymore.

The question is whether there is anything that can be readily made commercially viable and used for the role that we use the Cavendish now.

Most of the rest of bananas out there are not very much like the Cavendish we're used to (though some of the small ones are yummier-- if they could be made more hardy it would be worth getting used to eating tiny bananas ;).

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

#188

Post by Aromasin »

0xffff2 wrote: post #171
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my days working in software for the retail market about 20 years ago, we had to build functionality to allow the exclusion of bananas and milk from our predictive analytics application because EVERYBODY bought them. Probably over 99% of retail grocer transactions contained them.

As someone who despises bananas outside of banana bread, I find this episode of Banana Facts completely shocking. I always thought is was like cilantro, where some people think it tastes like soap. I guess I'm the only one who has to suppress my gag reflex whenever someone peels a banana within smelling distance?

I don't think I know anyone that doesn't like bananas IRL. It's the only thing that keeps me grounded and reminds me that we're all just a bunch of hairless monkeys.

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

#189

Post by burfog »

jmull wrote: post #150
burfog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With most of those, each type has a distinct use. Granny Smith apples are for baking, McIntosh apples are for eating fresh, Red Delicious apples are for decoration, and the rest serve no purpose. Russet potatoes are for baking, stew, and fries. Purple potatoes are for frying up with steak. The rest serve no purpose. It's different with bananas. Cavendish is good. Maybe the Gros Michel is good too, but I wouldn't know…

I can assure you, you are very wrong about the uses of other varieties of Apples and Potatoes. You're also wrong about russet potatoes for stew -- other varieties work out a lot better when you want your potatoes to hold their shape. (I would assume likewise with bananas as well, but I don't have the experience to know myself.) It's OK -- maybe you don't have the most acute tastebuds or just lack a culinary interest.…

I do have a strong culinary interest, but I'm also choosy. I try lots of things to discover what is best, and then I use what is best.

Russet potatoes are the best for stew. The others have off flavors or don't soften as nicely.

I have tried many types of cheese. I eliminated all except mozzarella and mild cheddar.

I have tried every exotic fruit in the store except durian. I ended up liking jackfruit, dragonfruit, rambutan, lychee, longan, and loquat.

The point of trying new foods is to find the best, not to pretend that they are all equally delicious.

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

#190

Post by dragonwriter »

disillusioned wrote: post #183
ashtonbaker wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries ... Fun fact, though - bananas ARE berries :)

Haha, fair point! I of course meant like summer berries like blueberries or strawberries. :-)

Strawberries are, despite the name, not berries, just as bananas are berries.
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