[AlexG]

Thought I’d pass this article on for your edification and contemplation.

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Source Link: http://www.slashfood.com/2011/01/04/kiss-bananas-good-bye

Photo: Getty Images

Should you prepare to buy your last bunch of bananas? According to a recent story in The New Yorker, the answer may be yes. The problem (which has also been deftly reported by writer Craig Canine, in Gourmet magazine and in an award-winning 2005 story for Smithsonian, is that growers have been relying on a single variety, the Cavendish and its genetic clones. What happens when you have a crop without genetic diversity? A disease, such as fungus Tropical Race Four, which is now running rampant, can take down an entire fruit. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The Cavendish became popular with good reason: “They are the only variety that provides farmers with a high yield of palatable fruit that can endure overseas trips without ripening too quickly or bruising too easily,” says New Yorker writer Mike Peed. Canine, who visited a Belgian lab that houses the world’s largest collection of banana varieties, tasted some of the varieties that may one day replace the Cavendish, including the Yangambi Km5, which just so happens to be hundreds of years old. “When I tasted it, I imagined I was tasting the future,” Canine wrote.

So will we be eating the Yangambi 5 on our Corn Flakes in a few years?

“I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”
~ Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens (1907)

[Robert McNay]

With all of the various varieties of plantains that are around and genetic engineering, I don’t think bananas will be dissappearing anytime soon.

[AlexG]

With all due respect, I don’t think the point of the article is that bananas in general will be wiped out, but the reliance upon a single monocrop is fraught with the danger of being seriously impinged upon by a blight.

After all, it’s not completely without past precedents.

Something similar, although in a far more devastating form happened in Ireland in 1840’s with the “Lumper” potato, which was the only one that they planted.

It’s a lesson we seemingly have forgotten in the modern age and with arrogance to believe that it can’t happen again . . .

“I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”
~ Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens (1907)

[Robert McNay]

AlexG wrote:

With all due respect, I don’t think the point of the article is that bananas in general will be wiped out, but the reliance upon a single monocrop is fraught with the danger of being seriously impinged upon by a blight.

After all, it’s not completely without past precedents.

Something similar, although in a far more devastating form happened in Ireland in 1840’s with the “Lumper” potato, which was the only one that they planted.

It’s a lesson we seemingly have forgotten in the modern age and with arrogance to believe that it can’t happen again . . .

Not really. It’s a lesson remembered but totally ignored in search of corporate profits.

[Author]

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