The Quest To Save the Banana From Extinction (theconversation.com) 224
Panama disease, an infection that ravages banana plants, has been sweeping across Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. The impact has been devastating. From a report: In the Philippines alone, losses have totalled US$400m. And the disease threatens not only the livelihoods of everyone in this US$44 billion industry but also the 400m people in developing countries who depend on bananas for a substantial proportion of their calorie intake. However, there may be hope. In an attempt to save the banana and the industry that produces it, scientists are in a race to create a new plant resistant to Panama disease. But perhaps this crisis is a warning that we are growing our food in an unsustainable way and we will need to look to more radical changes for a permanent solution.
It's a problem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Take wheat and other produce....from what I understand almost all of it is ONE type.
Notice you don't see varieties much in tomatoes at the normal grocery store? I won't go into it about the lack of flavor in them, but their a good example of how our modern food has been whittled down to only growing those types that can be picked early and survive long transport without rotting.
This happens because things aren't grown locally as much, and only in a few concentrated areas.
Variety in food types doesn't work quite as well with the industrial food industry we've developed, but it does open us up to potentially SERIOUS problems if a disease or bug latches onto the ones we grow, and there aren't other types out there that would not be as susceptible to said threat factor.
Banana's are not going extinct (Score:5, Interesting)
Just the cavendish banana. And it's the worst case monoculture too, without seeds all cavendish's are clones. There was a banana before the cavendish that also went away which is why they went to the cavendish in the first place.
there's a tonne of wild and domesticated bananas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Of course we'll lose all the orchards for a while. But they can eventually be reseeded with a new banana that is resistant.
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And hopefully we'll get some new, interesting varieties. It's a damn shame that pretty much all that is available anywhere is the cavendish. It's like if the only apple available anywhere was a red delicious. Variety is the spice of life.
Re:Banana's are not going extinct (Score:5, Informative)
The Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") didn't go away entirely. It's still grown in decent quantities in some parts of the world that haven't yet been touched by that strain of the Panama disease, but rarely seen in the US because those places either don't produce enough to be commercially viable (South America) or are too far away to ship before wilting (mostly Asia and Africa). They're occasionally available in specialty stores, but are fairly expensive because they're usually flown in rather than sent by ship, or are produced by growers that have to take extraordinary precautions to protect their groves. (I once saw a few available in a small store for something like $10 each, though Atlas Obscura bought them from Miami Fruit Company for about $2 each [atlasobscura.com]; they don't appear to be available as of this writing, but that may just be a seasonal issue.)
Work is being done on returning the Gros Michel to production because it has superior shipping qualities, the most important being a thicker, more impact-resistant skin. Cavendish are hard to transport without bruising, and with their (impending?) demise as a commercially-viable product, there's some value in looking back a half-century to try to fix the Gros Michel.
Of course, this just perpetuates monoculture and we'll likely have to deal with it again later, but for better or for worse, monoculture is part of what has enabled low modern food costs as it allows largely consistent methods for a given crop around the world, varying only slightly for local climate. It's a trade-off that will be with us for some time, if not essentially forever.
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Gros Michel also taste much better than Cavendish. Cavendish is one of the blandest species of banana. I see good riddance. Maybe it's time for many different species of banana to flood the market from small farms instead of a Cavendish monoculture from megacorps. I love banana bread/cake but they are best made with non-Cavendish bananas anyway. The corporations only got away with selling Cavendish because most people have never tasted other species.
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Well... replanted, not reseeded :) Average customers will never be happy with diploid or even tetraploid bananas, with hard seeds the size of BBs. And while new triploid (seedless) cultivars come from seeds, this is only done once, and then the banana is cloned from there.
But I fully agree with you. Enough this this nonsense banana monoculture. Give us options and diversity, come on!
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I don't get what you're trying to claim.
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I still haven't forgiven that generation for depriving X and future generations the experience of the Big Mike. The more I read about them, the more I want to try one.
Sad that they didn't learn at all from their unwillingness to take measures to preserve the strain, even though they probably had the means to do something to prevent extinction back then.
I wonder if it would be possible to take a Cavendish banana plant, and put it through some stress to cause it to go herm (like you can do with MJ plants) an
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Saw something to that effect further downthread moments after I posted, as often happens.
Nice to know there is hope.
Re: It's a problem.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: It's a problem.... (Score:5, Informative)
"Human intervention" is the cause of the problem. And they didn't really learn their lesson the first time through either, this isn't the first time the grocery store banana has been tumbling down the road to extinction.
The banana we have right now is quite bland by comparison with its predecessor - anything "banana flavored" you find today tastes like bananas used to taste like.
Hybridization is the reason we're in this mess with bananas - they cross-bread incompatible species to get traits they wanted, getting "seedless" as a bonus because they're triploid as a result, and thus are sterile. They're basically the Mule of fruits, cross-bred for desirable traits, with the added consequence of sterility.
So now we're making up for their lack of evolutionary adaptations by trying to make new varieties. Basically we're taking over the job of evolutionary response to disease. As long as we want those traits in bananas, we're always going to have this problem, and are going to have to continue to develop new hybrids - which is a slow process. These plants that are now incapable of evolving are faced with pathogens and parasites that can evolve, and that's a battle that's completely impossible for them to win.
I've picked up wild bananas at the farmers markets - those are fun, they're much smaller, and full of seeds bigger than peas. And you can pot them and grow them indoors, though you're going to need a good size pot and high ceiling. (spider mites also love them) Eating them is like back in the 1800's, you have to have a dish to spit out the seeds in just the same as a dish you'd have had to spit out the shot from the pheasant and squirrel. ;)
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"Human intervention" is the cause of the problem. And they didn't really learn their lesson the first time through either, this isn't the first time the grocery store banana has been tumbling down the road to extinction.
The banana we have right now is quite bland by comparison with its predecessor - anything "banana flavored" you find today tastes like bananas...
Interestingly the earlier banana, the Gros Michel, didn't go away completely. It just became far less available in the US. The article below does taste comparisons and the difference isn't as big as it's made out to be. Citation: http://www.promusa.org/blogpos... [promusa.org]
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While there are varieties of tomato seed available at your local provider, among others, they may not actually be very diverse. I get 'heirloom' tomatoes occasionally, and these are very different, so hopefully they are diverse enough, but I recall growing tomatoes, and the challenge of pests. They are not very tough.
It's probably the unfortunate circumstance with bananas is that they have been hit with a unique threat. Diversity in bananas would be a challenge I bet. Even though we also grows, as amateur f
Visit famers markets for more variety (Score:2)
While there are varieties of tomato seed available at your local provider, among others, they may not actually be very diverse. I get 'heirloom' tomatoes occasionally, and these are very different
At our local farmers markets they have a pretty wide variety of tomatoes, not sure what technically makes something "heirloom" but they have large ones, small ones, much darker than normal tomatoes, striped varieties... many of them far more delicious than what you get in stores. We grow them in pots and don't hav
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The biggest difference is not the variety, but between picking them ripe vs. picking them green and then ripening them. It's just a whole different taste and texture experience.
Really wish that a commercial solution could be worked out that would enable fruit to be actually picked ripe, not crushed in transit, and arrive at stores with still a reasonable amount of shelf life left... :P
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That's also true, awesome to pick ripe, but there really is a huge difference in flavor and somewhat texture across different varieties of tomatoes, well worth exploring. The striped ones I like better than anything (forget the variety name), pretty sure they are not heirloom but they are great.
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They can be grown indoors hydroponically, which is getting more and more economical....and that way you avoid the pests.
The old, ugly, gnarled and multi-colored ones taste so much better, much like I remember them in my children.....even store bought ones back in the day tasted MUCH better than the flavorless things o
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Indeed, wasn't this the point and lesson of the Irish Potato famine?
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In the Andes they have several potato cultivars.
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Many are quick to blame corporations and even producers for monoculture and the complete lack of flavor in today's foods, and definitely profit is a motive. But that's not all there is to the story. Consumers have also driven this problem. Consumers, by their buying habits, overall tend to prefer good-looking fruits and veggies over ones that have blemishes but might taste better. Consumers largely drove the move to base an entire banana industry on two varieties, of which one is cavendish, and the oth
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The key to having reliable food is to insist on seeds in all fruits and ignore the monoculture, GMO type people who think people are too stupid to handle seeds or who want GMO to fix the problems they themselves created in the first place with seedless bananas, and in the process create even more problems with the disaster that is GMO. Selective breeding can be used to find disease resistant varieties from the diverse seeded propogation. This would ensure the plant can better adapt to whatever plagues crop
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Yes, we call that "efficiency". It's what lets this planet easily feed its population now, beating all UN estimates from about twenty years ago, when they projected world hunger would be measured in low ten digits around today.
When in reality, developing countries now have a problem with obesity. We solved the world hunger problem in record time because agriculture has become very efficient and serves the needs of humanity far better than "natural state", which is starvation as the primary population limite
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the problem here is the term commercially viable. Its stupid marketers who think that the consumer is too stupid to be able to handle eating different kinds of potato.
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Indeed. We should go to natural state of things, that is starvation as the limiter to population numbers. While at it, we should also drop the rest of the technological development. Those vaccines are frankly just as heretical to primeval nature worship.
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nah-nah-nah, this is not true, waives finger. . A large number of banana species do produce large seeds and do sexually reproduce. Its only because of the marketing and so on that it was thought people were too stupid to spit out seeds so a seedless variety was bred that would cause starvation as they are killed off in mass by a plague were needed.
So once again, the 'technology" is the problem is marketers that mess with food, by messing the bananas up to cause a lack of seeds which is the problem , seed w
Will this be protested as a "Franken Food"? (Score:2)
TFA is interesting but the first thing that popped into my mind is that by doing this genetic manipulation of the (Cavendish) banana, humans are creating a new GMO and isn't that bad? Or is it good because it will help keep 400 million people from starvation?
Re:Will this be protested as a "Franken Food"? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Despite all the fearmongering, there's nothing inherently bad in GMOs.
Re:Will this be protested as a "Franken Food"? (Score:4, Informative)
Bananas ARE "frankenfood" already. The name already gives it away, it's a hybrid because you wouldn't even recognize its ancestors as bananas at all. The Cavendish is already the second banana variant, a "Banana 2.0" if you so will, and already second-rate to the Gros Michel that used to be the kind of banana you could get 'til about the 60s or 70s before it was pretty much wiped out by the very same disease that now threatens the Cavendish, too.
Just in case you're wondering how Josephine Baker could dance with bananas as a skirt: The Gros Michel was considerably larger and also tasted way better.
But banana trees are sterile. It's pretty much impossible to breed them, the only way to multiply them is cloning. Now guess what's the problem with this in regards to diseases. So you can't just breed resistant variants because, well, how? Unless you're putting the bananas in the CRISPR.
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Contributing to the problem is dedicating very large areas to a single crop. I used to grow an acre of tomatoes when I was a young lad and it was a constant battle to fight off the predators who found delight in the amount of food I was providing for them.
Birds, tomato worms, stink bugs, snails ...
Mother nature knew better. Tomatoes were here and there, among other aromatic plants that attracted pests not interested in tomatoes.
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Also, Cavendish already carry the gene to be resistant to this Panama disease - it's just damaged and inactive. There are other varieties of banana that have undamaged copies of this gene and are very resistant. So really we'd just be restoring something that we probably took out accidentally through selective breeding in the first place.
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Or, just take those varieties that have the undamaged genes and seed propogate those bananas , so selective breeding is the solution here. In other words, the problem with Bananas is not seed propogation, its that we stopped seed propogating them, or else the resistant varieties would have come to dominate the field automatically and could adapt on their own. So the problem with Bananas are people like you who do want seed propogation and selective breeding because you have such a condescending view of peop
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rather i meant to say, you do not want selective breeding and seed propogation, which are the solution to the problem, so you are part of the problem, you and your corporate monocultures and GMO
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Bananas are NOT GMO, though they are selectively bred. the key to saving bananas is to oust the marketers and put sell seeded bananas to the consumer and ignore the people who say the consumer cannot figure out how to spit them out. This will increase genetic diversity and allow the species to naturally mutate and evolve resistance to diseases that pop up.
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you will think that way until your GMO experiments are proven to cause cancer and cause massive mortality. All GMOs are bad and should be banned, its too risky.
Unsustainable food (Score:2, Interesting)
But perhaps this crisis is a warning that we are growing our food in an unsustainable way and we will need to look to more radical changes for a permanent solution.
Yes.
Quintessential example: the broiler chicken [wikipedia.org], a breed of chicken engineered to maximize its meat output, making it impossible to fend for itself in the wild, and 100% dependent on humans for survival. (Not to mention the irony of the word "survival", given its sole purpose is to feed humans.) And since it possesses an extremely narrow range
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Natural chestnuts in America were wiped out by a natural blight that stormed across the nation.
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We found the Ballchinian in this discussion.
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How's it gonna feel to be undone by Captain Marvel?
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So, we keep pumping them full of antibiotics
Antibiotics are not required to keep the chicken alive. It makes them grow bigger and fewer die of disease due to their shitty farm conditions.
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There is a substantial portion of chicken's being grown now that are not fed antibiotics. I've noticed that these organic chickens are becoming even more common in grocery stores. Because of this Demand there's little risk of Chicken disappearing. In fact the more people that pick Organic chicken meat the better it will be for everyone.
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I know right. How could it be possible that some species would exist primarily to provide sustenance to others.
And then you realized just how numerous parasites are in nature. Then you realized that each mammal type that has ever existed had countless thousands of different life forms in their digestive tracts alone that are solely responsible for feeding them. Then you hopefully realized that primeval nature worship you're espousing is based in a mix of utter ignorance of reality combined with lack of real
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Been There, Done That (Score:3)
"Yes! We Have No Bananas!" is a novelty song about a grocer from the 1922 Broadway revue Make It Snappy, is said to have been inspired by a shortage of Gros Michel bananas, which began with the infestation of Panama disease early in the 20th century.
It isn't that we don't learn, it is that there is too much profit in just ignoring the truth. Over 100 billion bananas are consumed worldwide each year and they make up approximately 75% of the annual tropical fruit trade. In fact, they're the world's most exported fruit.
Been happening (Score:4, Insightful)
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Big banana, you say? [google.is] :)
(No, get your mind out of the gutter... it's Musa ingens, the world's largest banana plant species, from Papua New Guinea :) )
Europe (Score:3)
Pfew ! Europe is spared !
Wait...
I'm not even sure they CAN "go extinct" (Score:2)
The grocery store variety of banana can't even be classified as a "species" in the first place...
SPECIES: a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding.
Since the hybrid we have created is sterile, it fails to meet this simple criteria. So can it "go extinct"?
EXTINCT: (of a species, family, or other larger group) having no living members.
Well I suppose technically it can go extinct even if it isn't a species proper, if you consider it a group or f
Additional Details (Score:4, Interesting)
Freakonomics lays out a good bit of detail behind the banana and the Panama disease that's coming to take out production for the second time here:
http://freakonomics.com/podcas... [freakonomics.com]
Nuke it from orbit (Score:2)
Or rather just the Philippines, more specifically the banana orchards. Kill the trees, end the infection, let the disease die out, then repopulate.
Confession: I have no idea if this is a good idea or not. But it seems easier than engineering a vaccine. Might take less time too. I can go a few years without bananas. Though I am sure the locals would be devastated. Closer to home, we have an over fishing problem with a particular sea crustacean. I wonder how much better it would be if we could just pay the f
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...I wonder how much better it would be if we could just pay the fishermen to not fish for a few years and let things repopulate rather than grinding away at a dwindling population.
Overfishing is mostly due to Asia from what I hear. Japan and China trawl the oceans relentlessly and North America could stop fishing and eating fish altogether and it wouldn't help much. Citations: https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au] https://qz.com/948980/china-ha... [qz.com]
Mono-crop Agriculture (Score:3)
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Aren't bananas even more special than that? I seem to remember they have to be pollinated by hand, by humans. It's like the original creature that took care of that went extinct or something.
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its because of the lack of seed propogation and that cuttings are used to propogate them. So there are no genetic mutations that can increase the chance some individuals will have resistance.
All together now... (Score:2)
"Yes, we have no bananas
We have-a no bananas today.
We've string beans, and onions
Cabbageses, and scallions,
And all sorts of fruit and say
We have an old fashioned to-mah-to
A Long Island po-tah-to
But yes, we have no bananas.
We have no bananas today."
Monoculture to blame, seeds the solution (Score:2)
What has done in bananas is the banana industry itself, on the idea that consumers will not eat a banana with seeds and are too stupid to figure out how to spit them out. So a seedless banana was considered essential and the industry has had basically a ban on seeds in banana. The best way to save bananas is for them to have seeds and propogate mainly with seeds. This increases genetic diversity and helps the species recover and adapt to plagues.
So really the big enemy are the marketing and corporate expert
It's one banana? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
I mean I like bananas, they are tasty, but they aren't exactly a healthy food. They are disproportionately loaded with sugars, low on nutrition
That all depends on how much you let them (over)ripen. Greener bananas (and plantains) are a great source of resistant starch [healthline.com], have a lot of fiber, and contain little sugar.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but then lack the entire selling point of bananas... being sweet and tasting better than other fruits. Cubans who love plaintains might disagree. For some reason they like to call them "sweet" but there is no sweetness in a plantain that I could detect despite years of eating them regularly in Miami. Plantains look like bananas but basically amount to a fibrous potato wedge that you brushed against your green lawn before cooking. That raw "green" taste really is just a background note though, nowhere near as overpowering as in green tea which may as well be brewed at similar strength from grass trimmings. All in all, they are a viable alternative to fried thicker forms of fried potato.
If one were to subscribe to the unsubstantiated Paleo-crowd fad claiming that resistant starch has health benefits okay but otherwise it's just something inert to fill your stomach with. Like insoluble fiber you are better off just eating smaller quantities of calorie dense healthy food, feeling hungry for a bit, then your stomach shrinks and then you'll feel full after eating less of any food. No inert dietary additions required.
Now, I'll grant you with insoluble fiber there is a hypothesis that low fiber diets lead to diverticulitis but that is entirely based on a correlation which also applies to many other things which changed through that time period. Medicine has been quick to pick up on that recommendation because it gives them something to say but there is no real science behind it. If you eat lots of healthy green vegetables you'll get plenty of it in any case without a need for extraneous carbohydrates (complex or simple) and certainly without a need toss green bananas into the mix.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
... Bruh, it sounds like you never ate 'maduros' (ripe plantains).
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If one were to subscribe to the unsubstantiated Paleo-crowd fad claiming that resistant starch has health benefits okay but otherwise it's just something inert to fill your stomach with.
I guess that really depends on what [asm.org] you [wiley.com] mean [researchgate.net] by [karger.com] unsubstantiated [nih.gov].
Why? Because they have no bones (Score:2)
Yes, but then lack the entire selling point of bananas... being sweet and tasting better than other fruits. ...
No, the selling point of bananas is because they have no bones. [youtube.com]
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How else are you going to accurately measure the length of things?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
In nature, opportunistically you find leafy plants and grasses in the greatest abundance, next up is meat, then berries and seeds, and then finally larger fruit which tends to be abundant when you find it but is limited in terms of where you find it. The grasses we largely can't digest without processing. The fruit seems unlikely to be a major target since not all apes eat it. Also our notable features are adaptability, opposable thumbs, walking upright, and being omnivores all of which suggest that our branch of evolution is about opportunistic feeding suggesting that naturally speaking we are nomadic creatures and not tailored to a specific garden of Eden region loaded with sugary fruit.
That reminds me of one definition of vegetarian - an old indian word meaning bad hunter
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop following the fad diets!
Bananas are far more healthy than a sugar cookie. Lots of fibre, vitamins and minerals. Sure, they have calories too but it isn't empty calories. Tomatoes are good for you and so are carrots. Fruits and vegetables are very important for health and longevity, stop buying into the fad diet bullcrap.
I wouldn't overdo Bananas, I wouldn't eat them every day, and I wouldn't eat more than one a day- but to say one shouldn't eat them is absurd. There are a mere 100 Calories in a banana- some of that is fibre and undigestable (but good food for your gut bacteria). You're far better off eating in moderation a wide variety of foods than following some restrictive fad diet that bans random food.
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Sugar is necessary to live. Fuck off, clown.
Go ahead and link that incredibly long and incredibly wrong "Sugar is Poison" YouTube video. Nobody buys your bullshit.
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that don't carry the sugar tax of bananas.
There is no "sugar tax" of bananas. Sugars in bananas are almost completely fructose which when consumed with a high fibre diet (such as the rest of the banana) is not actually bad for you. Not all "sugars" are created equal. Stop falling for the sugar industry marketing.
Evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
very misleading with the common push that it is okay to eat fruit
You know what tells me it's not only "ok", but healthy and beneficial, to eat fruit? Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
1 medium banana is about 105 calories. The average adult woman, to consume her daily calories, would need to consume 20 bananas per day. For the average man, about 25. Do you think you could eat that many bananas in a day if that's the only thing you ate? I think I'd get full at well before 5 bananas per meal.
15 bananas would be 135% of your daily carbs, which is surprisingly little for a fruit. You'd get 180% of your dietary fibre, 255% of your vitamin C, 300% of your B6, 105% of your magnesium, 15% of your Vitamin A, 30% of your protein, and 180% of your potassium.
No, bananas are in no way a "balanced meal", but calling them "not exactly a healthy food" and "low on nutrition" is a real stretch.
As for the topic at hand: can we for once drop this whole "there's only one type of banana" nonsense? Why is it that for almost every fruit you find in a grocery store, there's all sorts of varieties available, but for bananas, the only selection we're ever given is Cavendish, and before that, Gros Michel? Bananas are an incredibly diverse fruit (thanks to seedless varieties being easy to generate - just cross a tetraploid with a diploid, and some fraction of the resulting seeds will be triploid and thus yield seedless fruit). If we'd stop obsessing over having just one type of banana available, we wouldn't run into this "single disease can wipe them all out" nonsense.
Wish I could just go to the store and get some mysore bananas :(
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Ed: Whoops, for some reason I only multiplied by 15 bananas rather than 20-25 bananas. So you can increase all of those nutrition stats accordingly. Likewise, that would be ~7-8 bananas per meal, not 5!
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Thank you for this informational post. Obviously bananas are extremely healthy to eat for humans in general. Diet fads are definitely diet fads.
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The only reason the Cavendish is available in US (and all northern countries) grocery stores is because of transportation. Banana's are shipped via ship, it takes roughly two weeks to reach the US mainland grocery stores. In addition the rough handling the banana's receive during transport requires that they be tough enough to survive the journey without being bruised to ruin.
The Cavendish like the Banana before it, that ironically was wiped out by another disease early in the 20th century, have the toughes
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The Gros Michel still exists and is not totally wiped out.
Gros Michel on wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Indeed- and if anyone wonders what one tastes like, think of artificial "banana flavoured" things. Fake banana flavouring doesn't taste like your standard grocery store "Cavendish" bananas- that's because the artificial banana flavours were actually originally created to taste like Gros Michel, and that just stuck as the standard artificial flavour taste for banana flavoured things- even though we changed what our standard grocery store banana was.
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And even if you like the flavor of Gros Michel, it wouldn't matter. The same fungus that is wiping out the Cavendish banana also kills Gros Michel, so any area that is contaminated with that fungus won't be able to grow that variety, either.
The right solution, of course, is to build a few hundred square miles of greenhouses in the U.S., heated enough to keep them above freezing. That not only would allow for near-complete isolation from external diseases, but also would make it practical to grow species
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The durability of bananas is generally directly correlated with their peel thickness, and Cavendish bananas don't have an unusually thick peel; plenty of bananas have much thicker peels than them. Cavendish was chosen because it was the most similar to the Gros Michel, which was what the market was used to. They're really very similar bananas; I hear people talking up Gros Michel with longing as if it's so much better, but I think such people have never actually tried one. If you weren't looking for the d
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The durability of bananas is generally directly correlated with their peel thickness, and Cavendish bananas don't have an unusually thick peel; plenty of bananas have much thicker peels than them. Cavendish was chosen because it was the most similar to the Gros Michel, which was what the market was used to. They're really very similar bananas; I hear people talking up Gros Michel with longing as if it's so much better, but I think such people have never actually tried one. If you weren't looking for the differences, you could mistake it for a Cavendish. Some banana cultivars however are very different in flavour, barely "banana-y" at all. And some are weird looking, like Praying Hands or 1000 Fingers.
There's also one, I haven't tried it personally, but you chill it and mash it up and it tastes like vanilla ice-cream.
Can you eat just bananas? [Re:Why?] (Score:2)
1 medium banana is about 105 calories. The average adult woman, to consume her daily calories, would need to consume 20 bananas per day. For the average man, about 25. Do you think you could eat that many bananas in a day if that's the only thing you ate?
Not entirely a rhetorical question! Before the true cause of celiac disease was discovered (which is a story in itself), the only known treatment that would prevent celiac patients from dying was the banana diet [npr.org].
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"15 bananas would be 135% of your daily carbs, which is surprisingly little for a fruit. You'd get 180% of your dietary fibre, 255% of your vitamin C, 300% of your B6, 105% of your magnesium, 15% of your Vitamin A, 30% of your protein, and 180% of your potassium."
Only if you are eating according to ridiculously dated guidelines for which there is growing evidence leads to diabetes. We adopted that diet largely on the basis of a study across a handful of countries where dietary practices were most likely to
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Fad diets are all about self-sacrifice, not nutrition. Bananas taste so great that there has to be some grounds for declaring them sinful, so that they can be replaced by kale. Kale smoothies, kale bread, kale jubilee, kale Foster.
This is why the California cognoscenti who decide such things for hoi polloi replaced vegetarianism with veganism. They needed an excuse to get rid of brie, honey, and beer.
Re: (Score:2)
What you have stated is contrary to the facts. We are bombarded with carbohydrate. Bananas are a key source of them. Some individuals have the genetics that don't get Type 2 diabetes in the presence of lots of carbs. Look around you to see the long list of those that do. All things in sane amounts are reason that adding serious carbs causes a pancreas to freak out.
But instead, you go to the opposite side of the realm, barking about kale and other crap, to justify your advocacy of loading up whatever you wan
Re: (Score:2)
There was a big push to get more countries to grow bananas back when they were a fad in America, with fruit companies protected by American troops as well. This was where the term "banana republics" came from. So in some places banans are an ubiquitous crop.
Another problemw ith bananas is that the most common variety are all clones of each other and not grown from seeds, which reduces ability to cope with some diseases. Other varieties of bananas are around but not nearly so popular.
Re: (Score:2)
Natural sugars combined with high fibre is a perfectly healthy choice. The sugars in fruits are mostly fructose which are orders of magnitude less damaging to the body than that white shit in Coke. On top of that when taken with a high dose of fibre they aren't absorbed as readily.
Speaking of fibre, a banana contains 25% of the recommended daily dose. It's that easy, yet somehow the vast majority of the USA seems incapable of getting their recommended dose with a huge proportion getting less than 50% of the
Re: (Score:2)
All naturally occurring potassium is (incredibly mildly) radioactive. We still need it in our diet.
Bananas are hardly the most potassium-rich, and thus most radioactive, food. Nor is potassium the only radioisotope source in our food. For example, brazil nuts are about as radioactive as bananas, and that's from radium, which serves no useful biological role and is only harmful to the body.
Re: Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously Big Banana is here trying to convince us bananas are not a radioactive evil fruit. Its not working.
Re: Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Obviously Big Banana is here trying to convince us bananas are not a radioactive evil fruit. Its not working.
Big Banana was the inspiration of my name!
There's a kids show (or was a kids show) called Oswald (who had a dog named Weenie)- it was full of adult sexual references in every episode designed to fly over kid's heads- I'm surprised it ever got greenlighted. I had just been watching the "Big Banana Day" episode with my kids when I signed in to create a new account on here. (I used to have an old one but used a burner e-mail address and lost password).
If you like Big Banana- look up Oswald for some child "fr
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Only the new CRISPR techniques will be able to respond to this crisis fast enough to save the species.
This means that the new bananas will be GMO as well as being radioactive, so that only people like me will eat them.
and stomp on some minions (Score:2)
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You are spouting Atkins fad/cult nuttery. Many foods have carbohydrates and are good foods because we NEED CARBOHYDRATES....
We need carbohydrates, but not as many as the typical American diet provides, rich in potatoes, bread, and sweets.
With that said, though, bananas have a lot more than just sugar. As a general thing, eating fruit is healthy.
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm thinking of healthy things like green vegetables, fats (especially animal), meat and small doses of nuts/berries. Basically, if you are eating a diet closer to the one we evolved to eat rather than one based on a study across a few cherry picked countries that industry loved because it points you at agricultural output. No small portion of statements about the effects of various macro elements and foods leave unspoken their bias of assuming the context of this diet. More and more evidence is showing
Re: (Score:2)
Your answer is found in my answer to a guy another comment down. The short is that yes I make better decisions than you seem to expect and strive to make better decisions than I actually do. And that you seem to be comparing bananas to the worse things common in western diets. It isn't about the choices that are worse, it is about the choices that are better. Everything you get from bananas is either unbalanced (sugar), far less than ideal (incomplete protein), or is common in a number of other choices that
Re: (Score:2)
Growing them in Iceland fully under artificial light, not quite as easy. ;) That said, I really think I'm going to make it this time. My Jamaican Red has gotten truly massive, with a "trunk" like a proper tree. I keep watching each new leaf that comes out, hoping it's going to be a flag leaf...
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Interesting!!
What's a "flag leaf"?
Thanks in advance!!
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It's the unusually small leaf that you get before a banana plant flowers. Often it's followed by a pre-flag leaf which is about half the size of a normal leaf. Basically, when the trend of ever-bigger leaves suddenly reverses, flowering is close. So I'm keenly watching each new leaf :)
So far, the plant just keeps getting ever more monstrous... ;) I only have 4-5 meter ceilings, it better not get too much bigger (my coconut tree already touches them)
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I guess people like us who live in the first world and pay higher prices for or don't get bananas are nobodies?
It's more like we won't starve to death without them.
Re: (Score:2)
Commercial Bananas are NOT GMO. Period. GMO refers to direct manipulation of genes outside of sexual reproduction, not selective breeding. Selective breeding is considered safer since it is slower and places more restricition on what can happen, since genes cannot be transferred between species as with GMO.
Nearly all food grown commercially is selectively bred and is much changed from its wild version. Obviously GMO refers to a specific technique of direct DNA manipulation which has developed in the last 30