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Tsk

I actually quite like Dan Scardino – been interviewed by him twice and all that. But:

The most striking point made at this year’s forum came in a seemingly innocuous comment in the event’s opening speech. The director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Dr Qu Dongyu, questioned why, with more than 1,000 known varieties of banana, the world mostly depends on just one, a species called the Cavendish. That needs to change, he said, hinting that we are all part of the problem.

Cavendish is not a species, it’s a cultivar. And yes, this is important:

Most people don’t question why every banana they’ve ever eaten looks and tastes pretty much the same. Most of us will never try a blue java from Indonesia with its soft, unctuous texture and flavour of vanilla ice-cream, or the Chinese banana that is so aromatic it’s been given the name go san heong, meaning “you can smell it from the next mountain”. The demand for low-cost, high-yielding varieties has resulted in vast monocultures of just one type of globally traded banana, and this is true of many other crops as well. Homogeneity in the food system is a risky strategy, because it reduces our ability to adapt in a rapidly changing world.

Unlike wild bananas, which grow from seed, every single Cavendish is a clone, the offspring of a slice of the plant’s suckers growing below ground.

All of thosew 1,000 cultivars – not species – of banana are sterile in this same sense. The Blue Java also – for example – suffers from Panama Disease.

There are indeed the two ancestral, wild, bananas who propagate by seed. But they have, through varied cross breeding, produced those 1,000 types. And, you know, if you’re going to write a book about the problems of genetic diversity in our foodstuffs – Dan’s project – this is one of those things that you really need to get right at the beginning, no?

16 thoughts on “Tsk”

  1. I do get the impression from the article that, when awful Panama Disease sweeps through the banana crop, there’ll be no difficulty in introducing a new variety.

    So shrug.

  2. You have to learn to be more careful about distinguishing The Science from the sciences. The governmental responses to the pandemic proved instructive.

  3. Dennis, Inconveniently Noting Reality

    That needs to change, he said, hinting that we are all part of the problem.

    The problem is that we have UN salaryman inventing problems where there are none.

    Fuck off, mate. If consumers wanted 20 types of bananas and were willing to pay for said 20 types, they’d be in every fucking grocery store from Los Angeles to Helsinki.

  4. That’s exactly it Dennis. There are numerous types of banana for all tastes. However the preference for Brits is the Tesco variety. Doesn’t have to be like that. We buy two different normally. The Tesco & plantain for cooking. But there’s a couple of others it’s possible to get. May be more we haven’t found. The smaller red ones are my favourite. But we have the demand, UK doesn’t. Failure in banana marketing, not the consumer.

  5. “Homogeneity in the food system is a risky strategy, because it reduces our ability to adapt in a rapidly changing world.”

    I live in a place where if they weren’t shipped a couple of thousand miles, I would have *no* bananas at all. So any banana I eat must survive shipping.

    I suspect that there isn’t such a variety because most of those other varieties won’t survive.

    We do get some locally available varieties of apples. But we get a lot more varieties now than when I was young, due to better shipping methods. I’ve eaten lovely varieties not available in my area; when I ask why it’s usually “it doesn’t survive long trips”.

  6. “Homogeneity in the food system is a risky strategy” – that could be why the WWF has a logo featuring a Giant Panda rather than one featuring Homer Simpson.

  7. JuliaM,

    “Get Waitrose or M&S to sell it, and we sure will!”

    That’s probably the solution. Whoever is at the Banana Marketing Board needs to make luxury bananas a veblen good, or just put it in front of adventurous consumers.

  8. Bananas are a vertically integrated industry. Fyffes, Chiquita etc, own plantations, the special boats (refrigerated) to deliver, the warehouses etc. So much so that the US usual version of the Cavendish is known as the “chiquita”.

    Other ‘nanas will only get into that supply chain if the owned plantations plant them. Or, of course, if someone is willing to build another whole supply chain.

  9. Other ‘nanas will only get into that supply chain if the owned plantations plant them.

    Therein lies the problem. Local varieties are just that – local – and are not grown in quantities to make feasible wide-scale marketing and distribution.
    The island I live on in Hong Kong has local bananas growing semi-wild (a result of the decline of farming) but they are very difficult to find in the village shops. That, of course, is a separate issue, the land is abandoned but because of indigenous land rights the bananas still belong to someone and woebetide you if you decide to cut a hand for yourself.

  10. So any banana I eat must survive shipping. I suspect that there isn’t such a variety because most of those other varieties won’t survive.
    That we can get other varieties here would seem to indicate otherwise. As far as I’m aware, they’re shipped refrigerated in a nitrogen atmosphere.
    It is a matter of demand. Her who rules buys all sorts of fruits & veg Brits would never have heard of but are common in tropical Bahia. But we have a large S. American community here. So there’s a demand. If there isn’t the demand it’s not going to be supplied.

  11. As I may have mentioned, our neighbours are Ugandan Africans and there’s a van comes round every month or so with Ugandan produce. This includes something called an “apple banana”, much smaller than the Cavendish and with a taste reminiscent of (surprise!) apples. They have plantains too, of course, but they’re readily available in the UK, at least where there are enough WIndians to provide a demand.

  12. We eat the Cavendish because Panama disease infected too many of the Gros Michel plantations. We may have to switch again as the Cavendish is in turn under attack.

    While it is quite practical to get other types of banana (see, for example, https://myexoticfruit.com/shop/#!/products/banana-apple/variant/111408 and the other varieties they sell), before cheap air freight the bananas had to travel well to survive a long sea journey in a sellable condition, which greatly reduced the practical possibilities.

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