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?