Push Button Paradise

It was one of those odd coincidences. I was muching on a bag of "Inka Chips"--roasted plantains that taste much like salty corn chips, when I ran across this article, which had some interesting things to say about the lowly banana.

The "Cavendish" is the typical store banana you see everywhere in the USA. Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person. Also:

It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other...each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia.

A fungus is going around, wiping out the Cavendish wherever it strikes. Nothing, it seems, can stop it.

Also, the Cavendish reproduces directly, without any seeds, so standard cross-breeding efforts won't work. Now, plenty of growers have other kinds of perfectly good bananas, including those behind the Inka Chips, but the key problem seems to be consumer acceptance. Buyers (at least in the USA) are so used to the smooth, sweet Cavendish, that they won't accept anything else. Until they have to. Pass the oranges, please.

I leave it to readers to draw comparisons between the banana crisis and other areas of their digital or analog lives. -m

posted at: 00:21 | under: 2005-07 | 0 comment(s)