I managed to get a banana cultivar called an ice cream banana [1] at a farmer's market in Oahu, Hawaii. It was the best banana I've ever had. I wish there was more of a willingness to explore selling a wider variety of bananas. We have 5-10 kinds of apples in my local grocery store in New York and the same is true for the other US states I've lived (including Oklahoma).
Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for sale?
> Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for sale?
There was an interesting Forbes piece I read last night that answers this question:
TL;DR: because most varieties of bananas in nature are ugly as hell and have seeds; the banana people want must not be like them, and it must also ship efficiently and have good shelf life; only two cultivars managed to hit all of the requirements so far - Gros Michel, and - after it got eaten by disease - Cavendish, which is the one we eat today.
The article points out that the industry has been fully aware of the problems with monoculture for a very long time now, and they don't really have much options to fix it. The text blames modern anti-biotechnology/anti-GMO movements from taking away the one good option we had to solve this - genetic engineering.
> because most varieties of bananas in nature are ugly as hell and have seeds
I've had several different varieties besides the Cavendish; none of them were ugly or had seeds, and most of them tasted better than the Cavendish.
I suspect it's more about yield and where they can be grown and how well they ship (the others I've had were mostly in places close time here they were grown, though Manzanos sometimes show up in California markets as special items.) And the fact that the market is dominated by a couple corporate behemoths that don't really care to compete with themselves and would rather have two product lines (one organic, one not) than a larger number.
Many of those variants are related to the Cavendish or GM, and are not resistant to existing threats.
Those that are resistant, without seeds, with similar taste, often have thinner/weaker skins causing more spoilage/loss, lower shelf lives, are more expensive to harvest/store (grow in less dense groups) etc...
Those corporate behemoths would love to save money by not loosing good cropland to viruses that kill their crops, but the only solution to date that doesn't end up costing more elsewhere due to the issues mentioned above is GMO's and their potential to maintain those benefits while adding resistance (or apply those traits to other varieties that are already resistant).
the industry has been fully aware of the problems with monoculture for a very long time now, and they don't really have much options to fix it
That's hard to believe. Look at tomatoes. We don't need genetic engineering to fix tomatoes, we need a change in marketing & consumer demand. Tomatoes have been hyper-optimized for a small set of parameters, leading to little variety and bland flavor. Yet, if you look in the right places, you can find perfectly edible reasonably priced alternatives, proving the flavorless beefsteak is not the only marketable tomato.
There are, in Brazil you get at least 3 to 5 bananas in every single market.
Some are more sweet like "Prata" some are bigger like "Nanica", some are smaller like "Banana ouro" or one that smells somewhat like an apple called "banana maça".
There is also one for cooking "Banana da terra" used to make fish dishes mainly.
If you go to farmers there are even more.
It's probably a cultural thing, in the Netherlands you can find mainly 2 types, regular international one and the Cooking kind because of Asians mostly, which makes me really sad, Australia is like that as well.
A lot of American grocery stores also do a terrible job of simply naming the variety. For example, mangoes come in a wide variety & my local stores will often carry different ones. They are always labeled as "mango" though and never specify a variety. So it's Russian roulette on the taste & whether you will need to floss or not after eating it.
I think it got more to do with the fact that Bananas are a domestic fruit in Brazil but need to be imported to the US/Netherlands/Australia.
Importing is more cost efficient at scale, i.e. importing dozens of tons of the same type of banana should be more affordable than importing the same tonnage of a dozen different banana types.
By catering to one or two established tastes you also run less risk of being stuck with excess banana stocks of types that might end up not appealing to the local tastes, so people play it safe and just import the types which are known to sell well.
It's likely to be purely economics of scale at play. Bananas are not indigenous to Brazil, but the climate is ideal for them, so more varieties are available without complex and expensive shipping and handling logistics involved.
There are almost guaranteed others that are just hard to find, though as others have pointed out some are harder to ship. Go find grocery stores that caters to (West) African or Asian cuisine, and you'll at the very least almost certainly find plaintain varieties and possibly others.
But other than that, I expect it has a lot to do with what people expect a good banana to look like. E.g. Cavendish bananas tends to get removed from the shelves when they start to go brown/black, while plaintains are often still popular and sold until they've gotten much darker and look overripe and too soft for those of us used to Cavendish, for example. And we expect a certain consistency, and to not have to worry about e.g. deseed a banana - both expectations that'd be violated by a huge portion of the available varieties.
Carrots are in a similar position - there are huge amounts of varieties of all kinds of shapes and colors, yet the "right" look of a carrot is so ingrained that the few other varieties usually on offer tends to be sold almost as novelties.
They're not really biologically distinct. There are just some banana cultivars that taste good without cooking and some that taste better after cooking.
Not really true - as the other poster said, they are all part of a sort of species-complex. Some cultivars need to be cooked for hours, some for minutes, some are tasty without cooking.
I was going to mention Hawaii too. There are at least 5 sweet varieties seen commonly in local stores and markets... and still more cooking bananas & plantains.
Here in Washington state, I've found that small grocers focused on Vietnamese and Asian markets often carry a variety of bananas. They are amazing both in texture and taste.
I know this won't solve your problem, but walk into any fruit market in Kenya and you'll have ten varieties (none of them "ugly" or "with seeds"). So I guess we poor westerns just get the shippable one.
Most of the grocery store apples are awful though.
And they've really pushed it in recent years (warehousing the apples for a long time, reducing the average quality). Or maybe I've gotten more picky. But some of the newer varieties, in season, are just delicious.
A disproportionate number of the apples in the grocery store have MacIntosh in their ancestry and are basically variants of them. There's not a wide variety of genetic diversity among eating apples, despite apples having a couple milennia of breeding history, a huge number of varieties (historical and current), and fairly diverse genetics. Consumers seem have a fairly narrow palette in what they consider to be a good eating apple.
> A disproportionate number of the apples in the grocery store have MacIntosh in their ancestry
Interesting! I love Macintosh apples having grown up on them from my mother who is from Vermont (She makes a mean Apple Pie with only those). Sadly, I can never seem to find them here in the Bay Area. My mother makes a large order shipped from Vermont every Fall.
All that to say, I'm surprised the apples that taste pretty poor to me are closely related to Macintosh.
That’s odd, I live in the Bay Area and all of the grocery stores in my town (big chains - safeway and lucky) carry Macs. I know this because they are my favorite, and the ONLY apple to use for cobbler, crisp, or pie.
I am growing Blue Java bananas at home. If you live somewhere bananas can survive winter[1] then they're nice plants to grow yourself.
1. Cold enough and the plant above ground will die but the roots (corm) survives and in spring the plant will grow back amazingly fast. Too cold and the corm will die too, and you're out of luck. The US South and Southwest is good, and of course tropical climates.
I am getting tired of reading "Death of a Cavendish" articles, which prophesy doom for "the banana", and hint at some mysterious past banana that's now gone - the Gros Michel.
Jut as you say - there are other bananas! I've had them! I've had them in the UK, usually from non-mainstream, international food shops. I've had them in Indonesia, New Caledonia and various other Far East/Oceania areas. I've had apple bananas, lady-fingers, Fe'i and more...
There seems to be this delusion that there's such a thing as 'a banana' in the west, so we get 'bananas'. We miss out on the really tasty varieties and we fret that the most generic might die out and then we'd have no bananas. There are loads of genetically diverse types, and what's more if it wasn't for the insane monoculture the spread of disease wouldn't be half as bad.
Even the same banana species can taste very different depending on the country.
In Europe, bananas are branded and consumers have a tendency to choose specific brands based on quality. In Australia, fruits in grocery shops are rarely branded and I found that bananas in Australia are usually not as good: they're just very sweet but kind of plain.
I've heard stories that in Australia, farmers export the best fruits overseas and keep the worst ones to sell locally. I guess it has something to do with the fact that Australian consumers aren't very picky. You have to go to a special farmer's market if you want something good.
You can easily buy other varieties in Latin America in grocery stores in the country side but they do not travel well and so that is where they remain.
I've seen this story about the Cavendish banana for close to 20 years now. I think the first time was on Slashdot in the late nineties or early aughts. Every time, the article predicts the imminent death of the varietal.
The articles always make a persuasive case. So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out?
> So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out?
This article makes the point. The fungus has no quick propogation methods, as it's only spread by moving infected earth: it's simply very resilient once established.
So the last X years have been a slow motion "We know this is a problem. It's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Eventually it will be an insurmountable problem."
The article also notes that there were a substantial number of "flex years" the last time this happened, as deforestation was used to open up new, un-infected land for banana cultivation.
In summary: it's like the IPv6 problem.
We knew it was coming, but resource exhaustion takes time.
Thank you so much, this is the first time I’ve seen this explained in terms I fully grasp. I was getting to the point of wondering whether or not these articles were submarines, but your explanation is far more cogent.
Knowing it's a real problem actually comforts me to an extent. If we can slow these kinds of things down, then we can win the race of making new varieties.
Still has to go through all the usual trials, etc, before it can be grown commercially, and then there'd be questions over GM regulation, market-acceptance, and whether the crop is productive and easy to manage for commercial growers to sort. (Usual productisation questions for a new crop variety to have to jump through.)
Also, concerns about the long term (decades+) results of fixing similar issue by only splicing new genes in.
Nature exploits opportunities. If we're still planting monocultures of cloned plants (plus whatever genes), that's still going to be enticing prey. See: Roundup resistant weeds.
I'm not sure that fungus gains anything evolutionarily meaningful from learning to infect this particular banana.
The only thing you get from this is annoying humans, which doesn't sound a very good evolutionary strategy (second only to being used in Chinese traditional medicine)
People have gone to great lengths to stop the propagation of the disease. Up to the point that entire fields are destroyed, and lands abandoned (for bananas) for years.
I honestly think this story recurs so often not because it's comparatively important, but because it's a grabby hook of a story and because James Dale of the Queensland University of Technology (who is quoted in every instance of the story I've seen) has an incredibly tenacious publicist.
I've also heard the same thing about killer bees in California and IPv4. Basically don't trust "experts". Experts typically misunderstand actual risk, and they generally forget about how innovative humans are when we need to be.
In south east Asia we get many different types of banana. I've come to prefer many of the less sweet varieties. If the Cavendish goes extinct my hope would be that we stop this mono-culture nonsense and embrace variety much like we have with apples etc.
This was a big disappointment for me in moving to North America — how little variety there is in the grocery stores, and how bland the tastes.
Actually I’m overstating it — there’s lots of variety in engineered food sounds like breakfast cereals (though interestingly not in potato chip flavors) but the fruit and veggie choices in the supermarkets are pretty limited and boring.
I've "only" spent half a year on SEA, but this is exactly it. I really miss the variety in mangos for example, but also banana, non of the in europe available bananas tastes great compared to average Thai street bananas.
Interestingly enough getting some specific cornflakes was easy and as you said chips and stuff has more variety anyway. On average i had a better selection of swiss chocolate than in neighbooring countries of switzerland.
North America is a large place. There are at least a half dozen different climates. Michigan has excellent variety with apples, peaches and cherries for example, but bananas are limited to Dole or Chiquita's Cavendish. Perhaps the availability of local fruit suppresses demand for banana variety. I've only seen more choices of banana in larger cities and university towns.
In South America you can also get a variety of bananas. I was surprised by how different bananas can taste. I'd really like to be able to buy them at supermarkets (in Germany/Europe), but you rarely get offered any type besides Cavendish and maybe cooking bananas, but that is just the tip of the iceberg of banana variety.
I really enjoyed the bananas when I was in Vietnam. It was a shame to come back to Cavendish bananas at home, I find that they are almost chalky in flavour to me.
The same could be said about any variety of apple; they are cuttings grafted onto rootstock. The grafted sections were cut from a tree of that variety, which was grafted from another one of that sort, going back all the way to the original one of that variety that was discovered (most likely thanks to Johnny Appleseed). Apples are clones, just like bananas; sexual reproduction of apples creates in most cases, apples which aren't good for eating. I suppose with apples, one difference is that you can use different rootstocks for some diversity and resistance against soil-borne diseases.
Navel oranges are similar. They are a mutant - one orange growing within another.
Navel oranges are characterized by the growth of a second fruit at the apex, which protrudes slightly and resembles a human navel.
According to a 1917 study by Palemon Dorsett, Archibald Dixon Shamel and Wilson Popenoe of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), a single mutation in a Selecta orange tree planted on the grounds of a monastery near Bahia, Brazil, probably yielded the first navel orange between 1810 and 1820.
Because the mutation left the fruit seedless and, therefore, sterile, the only method to cultivate navel oranges was to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus trees.
My understanding is how they reproduce. A cultivar reproduces "sexually", and is "true to seed". If you plant the seed you get the same or very similar plant (which produces the same seeds).
To clone is to trick an organism to divide into two or more organisms. This means they have the same strengths and weaknesses because they have nearly the same genes.
Cloning can be done by rooting cuttings of a plant or attaching a cutting of a desirable plant to a root stock of a less desirable version (or a version with qualities like limited height to keep the tree small)
"Some cultivars "come true from seed", retaining their distinguishing characteristics when grown from seed. Such plants are termed a "variety", "selection" or "strain" but these are ambiguous and confusing words that are best avoided. In general, asexually propagated cultivars grown from seeds produce highly variable seedling plants, and should not be labelled with, or sold under, the parent cultivar's name." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivar#Seed-produced
Furthermore, "Which plants are chosen to be named as cultivars is simply a matter of convenience as the category was created to serve the practical needs of horticulture, agriculture, and forestry."
Apparently bananas as we know them are a mostly sterile hybrid of two other trees.
They self propagate like you say (but humans also spread them around). Bananas have a near zero rate of sexual reproduction, if you can get one to produce a seed, it's viability is low.
If you can get the seed to germinate, the resulting "offspring" from that will be distinct from the original banana, a new variety. It will not necessarily be "true to seed". It might be a better banana, or worse.
If you plant a lettuce seed you will get the same lettuce, year over year. Same with peppers and tomatoes, etc. Their traits were bred instead of cloned.
I'll be watching this closely as a precursor of more damage to come. If the fungus is able to make it from Southeast Asia to the Americas, then the rubber plants in Southeast Asia may soon fall to the South American leaf blight. That would cause the complete destruction of the global natural rubber market.
Excellent additional reading in Growing American Rubber by Mark R. Finlay.
All ethical thoughts aside for a moment (most of this article actually made me sad), is there any remaining strain of the Gros Michel?
Seems to me from the articles’ tone like the Cavendish was more of an inferior stopgap solution. If we start genetic fixing bananas, doesn‘t it make sense to start on the „better model“?
I think that's a great idea, but economically all the investment right now is probably in saving the Cavendish banana. Not only is that what modern customers are familiar with but it's also what the industry is set up to produce.
However, it that succeeds, perhaps it will inspire people to duplicate the feat with the Big Mike / Gros Michel. And inspire investment to back that, both for profit potential from a "new" product and for insurance in case some new problem befalls the Cavendish.
But I'd bet investors don't want to divide their efforts right now.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, Gros Michel is still grown and consumed in Asia. It's the Central American plantations that were ravaged by disease, and that's where the US/Europe get their bananas from.
The Gros Michel isn't extinct AFAIK so... yes, there are existing strains.
I guess the better question is what does "better" mean to the consumer? Tastes "better"? Looks "better?" These are subjective traits and consumers are so used to the Cavendish now that if the look, feel and taste isn't similar enough you might have a problem.
This Fusarium situation almost seems like timing an economic collapse. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been reading articles about the coming bananapocalypse since grade school. So maybe we should be convinced it's going to happen, but when? Next year? Next decade? 2045?
As an aside, I don’t really like the most common banana available in Australia. Growing up in the southern part of India, I distinctly remember 7 varieties which I haven’t seen elsewhere. If the death of the most common banana means others may become more commonly available, I’m all for it.
Correct, I'm living in Thailand currently and the local bananas all look very much like Gros Michels. They taste great to me and are super cheap, very good joules per money.
Though Southeast Asia, where bananas originated, grows dozens of varieties of banana, the Cavendish is the only kind deemed acceptable for export.
This is a pity because a lot of the bananas you see here in SE Asia are more flavorful than the Cavendish anyway. Industrial agriculture's need to produce identical, identifiable, marketable products year after year is responsible for some very destructive and fragile monocultures.
The fact that this was a story, then stopped being a story, and is now a thing again, with no interaction on my end, makes me sleep much better at night. Stop caring about the variables you can't control, and you'll live a better life. There were even people who prospered when world war II happened. Bernard Russell said that WWII was one of the best times of his life, personally.
I also wonder, if in addition to looking at genetically modifying the banana to be resistant, what about modifying the fungus so that a strain is symbiotic with the banana and instead of killing it's host, it was able to keep going because the host isn't killed?
That's all very hand wavy, but I was thinking, might not another alternative be modifying the enemy (bacteria or virus) so that there is a selective weight to a more beneficial alternate bacteria?
Of course, any part of humans trying to manage the food supply, or nature in general, will have unintended downstream consequences, but I wonder if there are some other ways to approach the problem.
Also, of commercial bananas don't replicate via seeds, why do they have seeds at all?
I remember when I was in Australia a few years back, a friend told me the government was running an entire campaign to destroy banana plans because they got this thing that led to spots on the banana. But my friend said it didn't hurt the plant or reduce the lifespan of the banana.
But the government started slashing people's plants on their own property to eradicate it. The whole thing was funded by banana farms and forced people to buy from farms rather than grown their own.
I don't think that's what the article is referring to, but do any Australians here remember that campaign? What was that specific disease?
The article seems to promote lab grown method of planting over shoot from parent based method. Ideally the shoot from plants would be much better because if one plantation gets affected it might not affect the other plantations as they are not shared and there is a vast distribution of the same variety.
Some varieties of banana do rarely breed. IFAIK, cavendish doesn't.
I just don't get why people want to import only that variety. It's not great any any way besides being easy to package. Transportation is quite fast nowadays, it shouldn't be that big a problem.
Faster transportation costs more and they have to be shipped before they are ripe and then triggered to ripen in time for sale. And then while they are for sale they probably do better if they are attractive and consistent and known by the consumer.
1) It's really hard and we just don't know how yet
2) Creating an engineered biological weapon and releasing it into the environment just might have some unintended consequences when it starts interacting with all the things out there which could cause it to mutate
I doubt our understanding of biology is strong enough to be sure that we could do something like that without causing major problems. It would, possibly, be more viable to construct an altered version of the fungus itself which could outcompete the one that kills the bananas, which is the kind of approach that has been investigated for controlling other pests such as mosquitos (although in that case they engineer mosquitos which produce sterile female offspring but viable males, so the males keep breeding and producing more sterile females... eventually you run out of fertile females and tada! No more mosquitos).
Maybe it is, but CRISPR (as a method of genetic engineering) is like... 3 years old? These things take time. Also, there's crazy-level opposition among general population for anything that puts genetic engineering and food in the same sentence, so this is probably a big reason why it isn't going to happen (at least not until most bananas die off, and the price goes through the roof).
I see these at a cadence that works with price engineering. I don't believe it. I think it is like "ham supply is constrained this easter" and then they mark up the prices and there are the same number of hams. They were engineering the market, not presenting an actual problem.
Skepticism is a great trait, but it should be your catalyst, not your conclusion. The article(s) showing this have numbers that support the claim, not to mention the history of previous cultivars' demise via similar mechanisms. Do you have something to the contrary?
Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for sale?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana