"But the GMO lightning rod distracts from the larger cautionary tale: Our reliance on monoculture to feed surging global populations is catching up with us."
A lot of old true-to-seed breeds of plants with diverse sets of attributes (like e.g. being more resistant to certain environmental conditions) haven't been cultivated for economic reasons and consequently have become extinct by now.
There are some enthusiasts trying to preserve those old breeds by running seed-banks but they have a hard time to do so even here in Europe because of corporations like Monsanto and their heavy lobbying trying to outlaw this movement.
Arche Noah:
"In the past 100 years we have lost about 75 percent of agricultural diversity worldwide."
which has been used against at least one seed bank.
At a quick glance, it indeed lends itself very well to corporatocratic usages.
Having said that though, it's quite unsettling how there is much blogging about "monsanto lobbying against seed banks", without absolutely any reference which is not word of mouth.
As for word of mouth, until John Deere adds a repeater onto their tractors it's what we have to work with. I'd use my Chromebook, but Google's networking layer in Javascript continues to remain broken.
The link to the full paper isn't working but if that is who I think it is (Vandana Shiva) I'd take that paper with a massive grain of gluten-free sea salt. She's the one responsible for the Indian farmer suicide myth, as well as a bunch of other complete nonsense.
I don't understand the downvotes either. The only way I can explain them is that there are certain categories of debate on HN which instantly attract large numbers of trolls intent on suppressing certain avenues of discussion.
I didn't vote the comment either way, but it isn't all that relevant. Grocery store bananas are a monoculture because seedless fruit is more desirable, which makes breeding difficult, and also because 'the generic consumer' desires consistency, which makes it difficult to try to market new varieties. There isn't some big agenda behind it.
I think it is mostly government supported now, but in the past, it's been the case that banana companies have supported research into creating new varieties, which is sort of the opposite of the claimed corporate agenda of making it impossible to maintain heirloom varieties.
Few first minutes after submission of a comment is usually quite random and often you get downvotes Out Of Frakkin Nowhere. Fortunately, the reason usually catches up after a while and situaction rectifies itself. It's usually best to just ignore initial downvotes.
In a general way, I would agree with you. However, my experience has been that topics such as Israel/Palestine, GM and 9/11 attract an unusual amount of attention from astroturfer types (by which I mean exceptionally opinionated people who have not logged into the site for months or years, and have never made a contribution to a technical discussion).
I look at a thread like this and consider you and your downvoters to be two sides of the same coin. You might feel the need to beat the drum about Monsanto and GMO. Others feel the need to beat the drum for pushing forward with the boundaries of knowledge and the benefits that it can provide. You're being downvoted by people who feel differently than you do. Dismissing them as trolls, astroturfers or noncontributors (you don't know who they are) seems to me like rationalizing or propagandizing.
You might be right, but I usually still don't care about it. Topics like that usually have a higher bar for thoughtful comments, but the ones that manage to get over that bar are still visible and discussed. Astroturfers are annoying, but then again karma is just random Internet points; what matters to me more is if a comment manages to start a discussion involving other HNers posting interesting insights.
Karma isn't just random Internet points (in fact, that purpose of karma is pretty irrelevant and one's global "karma score" could just as well be removed without consequence.) The real point of voting is that it sorts comments, so that the dross of a conversation can fall below a certain line and you can stop reading the conversation before that line. Astroturfers negate the value of sorting, such that you have to read (or at least skim) the dross if you want to find the good comments.
Well, I guess I don't trust greying-out that much or am just curious, but I tend to skim the heavily down-voted comments anyway. Every now and then, one can find a pearl of wisdom in them.
It's indeed relevant. This is one of the biggest reason why monoculture and monsanto-like-GMO will never work (even if we knew how to properly create GMO, which is not the case and another subject).
If you create a GMO which is targeted to kill some insects or plants, there is then a huge incentive due to the large size of the crops and the lack of diversity for a new kind of insect / plant to resist to this GMO, it would have a massive competitive advantage and could spread much more quickly. There is only a benefit in the first years you are using it until the environment is adapting itself.
This is why when you buy Bt or herbicide-resistant GMO seeds, you have to either get conventional seeds mixed in, or you must plant conventional seeds yourself in the same field. This is called "refuge" and is a regulatory requirement that both GMO seed manufacturers and the government take very seriously. And your claim that "we don't know how to properly create GMO" is incredibly dismissive.
Yes but the size of the refugee is not large enough even in theory to cover the risks and in practice, the refugee crop is even smaller due to the loss of money by doing this.
I'm not sure why you downvoted but one interesting detail is that current GMO's are not equivalent between them, unlike their traditional counterpart. There is huge differences between the same plants on the same crop and current GMO's are not stable (in the scientific term).
That's what I mean by we know how to create GMO's properly with a reliable technique. This however might change in the future.
For anyone who's in interested in learning more about bananas, overthrowing governments and installing puppet dictators (before it was cool!) told in a true fast-paced rags-to-riches tale I highly recommend the book: "The Fish That Ate the Whale". So, so good.
Fun fact: if you have ever have those small banana lollies, they taste quite different to bananas now. That is because they were created during the time of the Gros Michel, the old type of banana.
And all bananas are cloned from the same variety, one reason this virus is such a concern.
> And all bananas are cloned from the same variety, one reason this virus is such a concern.
Did you read the article? One of the MAIN POINTS of this article was that this oft-repeated 'fact' is untrue. That, in fact, only a small portion of bananas are Cavendish grown for export, and that the non-cavendish (not cloned) bananas are also vulnerable to this fungus (not virus).
Actually, the article explains that 60% of Cavendish fruits are eaten locally - farmers grow the strain due to its high availability and very high yields. It's not "all bananas", but the Cavendish does have a vast majority, both locally and in export.
There are plenty of resistant banana varieties out there. They gained their resistance by reproducing normally and adapting to the new fungi. However, that very fact makes it less palatable for the western market, because fertile bananas have hard seeds in them that make them harder to eat.
What the big banana growers are looking for is another sterile banana variety that they can plant from cuttings that will never evolve, but will somehow be resistant to all the new fungi that nature is likely to throw at it in the future. Not that likely to happen.
But if the fungus has already ravaged plantations in Malaysia, why are there still so incredibly many different varieties of banana available there?
I was in Indonesia recently, and the markets there had tons of different banana varieties. And they all had a lot more taste than the Cavendish. Export those to us!
The reason why artificial flavors in general are different, is that a plant's flavor is made of a lot of different chemicals, and artificial flavorings only include the most noticeable (and least expensive) ones - so all the subtleties get left out.
No idea if the change of banana varieties also affects it, or not.
Fun fact, wild bananas are tiny and full of seeds. There's a lot of money being spent sequencing and understanding bananas in order to fight this kind of problem.
We grow one of these strains in our back yard here in southern Florida. You can't peel them and eat them like a "regular" banana, but you can slice the fruit from around the seeds (in the middle) and make some awesome banana bread the taste of which is quite simply impossible to achieve with store bought bananas. My kids say they taste "way more banana-y" than the ones from the store.
It could just be because you're harvesting them when ripe, similar to how tomatoes grown in your garden seem to have 10 times the flavour as the store bought ones.
However, I wouldn't rule out a difference in the actual flavour being a big factor too.
>Maturity and ripeness are two different things. Mature bananas may be picked green and will ripen off of the tree. This is how all commercial bananas which you purchase in the supermarket are done. Immature bananas will not ripen properly. Hanging time on the tree, to achieve maturity is different for each variety. I have ripened Kru fruit after only 6 weeks hanging time. However, my first bunch of Saba fruit required 11 months on the tree before ripening.
>Color change is evidence of ripening. Different varieties have different shades of yellow when ripe. Once again, becoming familiar with your particular variety is crucial.
>Knowing when to pick your bananas is the final step in enjoying your harvest. I approach each new variety this way: when the first hand (not the flower) appears, (this is the most important step) I write the date on the side of the stalk with a felt pen. After 6 months, if they have not shown any color change, I cut off the top (oldest) hand, and allow it to ripen (usually in a couple weeks). If it is OK, I continue removing hands as I need them. Eventually the rest will ripen on the “tree”.
in south america there is no "banana". if you ask someone to buy bananas you get a very puzzled look.
there are tons of types of banana. and none have this sweet, tutti frutty flavour the banana imported into the US has.
so, your wild banana is just one kind of a hundred.
south asia is the the same as south america, but with a whole lot of other kinds of bananas.... so there is plenty of variety other than cavendish and wild. most of the wild ones around brazil have almost invisible seeds. and are very easy to peel. and they go from huge (nanica... ironically means tiny) to very small ones (prata, ouro)
We're starting to get more kinds of bananas available here in the Asian groceries (who cater to just about anybody) -- 4 or 5 varieties. But I have no idea how to buy them. Half of them look bad on the shelf to my American banana buying eyes and I'm familiar enough with plantains to know that banana shaped fruits don't always taste like the bananas I grew up with.
Hell, I should just go buy some and see what they taste like.
On vacation in Indonesia I tasted lots of different varieties of very small bananas. They all had a lot more taste than the Cavendish. I wouldn't mind seeing those in European supermarkets, although they do indeed not look as nice as the Cavendish. For some reason we seem to select food by appearance instead of taste. (This is also why the standard Dutch tomato is beautifully red and tastes like water.)
Just buy them, then try to find recipes on the web.
That's how my wife and I always do it and over the years we've discovered a lot of very nice dishes we'd otherwise have never heard of. Just stay clear of black salsify -- it's tasty but very difficult to prepare without making a mess.
How do you legislate against a seed library? I can understand the big companies patenting particular seeds, or lobbying against state funding for libraries - but actually legislating against one? (Not trolling: genuinely interested in what arguments a Monsanto lobbyist (say) could use in this case).
The banana cultivar we usually eat is the Canvendish Banana. This cultivar is propagated asexually so in a sense all of the banana plants are of the same clone. Attempting to fight the fungus with genetic engineering is extra tricky because of this, because the banana plants do not reproduce.
But maybe someone finds a way. Anyway, I want to remind how papaya cultivation in Hawaii was almost wiped out by a virus disease, but they did some genetic engineering in the 1990's, and after that everything has been fine.
Mono culture where you clone one banana so all other bananas are exactly the same is by design stupid. Imagine you have a disease, compare it to a computer virus. Now exactly all other computers are running the same software, there is a virus that attacks them, all computers are knocked out in one blow. This is how the banana industry are handling it at the moment with cloning.
And yet that's exactly how most people are managing their computers, especially with the devops movement. They standardize on a single OS, a single set of software, and make the entire process identical and repeatable over the entire cluster. Managing servers is just impractical otherwise.
We don't eat bananas anymore in our house, largely for the reasons outlined in the article.
The thumbnail summary: bananas only started being widely consumed in the 1960s because of heavy marketing efforts by Central American railroad builders (they had to do something with the land along the sides of the newly built railroads, and bananas happened to fit).
They are heavily chemically treated, more than any other fruit. They've been a monoculture almost since Day 1.
Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'
I didn't find this article all that well written or informative. I recommend Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World
I also happened to read John McPhee's Oranges at the same time. The contrast between the orange (an ancient fruit, widely consumed, hardy, with a rich literary tradition) and the banana is stark.
Both books, by the way, are great little studies in technology business. Techno-optimism, marketing, PR, globalization, manic CEOs; it's all there.
I think you're making it out to be worse than it really is.
Bananas are heavily chemically treated with ethylene, an inert gas which causes plants to ripen faster and is harmless to humans.
(Fun fact: It's why bananas are never put next to other fruit in the supermarket, because they will cause other fruit to ripen and spoil faster.)
Bananas also haven't been a monoculture since day 1 either - but have been developed that way through centuries of selective breeding. The article outlines the monoculture problem quite well, but doesn't really mention that it's because the consumable plant [mostly] only reproduces asexually.
What's wrong with using tiny stickers on fruit for 'branding'?
Haha, I am not an expert in the least. I would be happy to hear my evidence is bunk. I'm just trying to point toward a source that I found interesting and informative.
Indeed, with food production, the evidence and points of view are always very diverse and nuanced. It's a complex subject--endless, really.
Here's a clip about banana chemical treatment...
> "...Zemurray finally addressed the problem. He found a solution, which he called 'Bordeaux Mixture' and that combined copper sulphate, water, and lime. Zemurray's experts cautioned him against its overuse but he had it pumped on the plantations in increasing quantity. It was a cocktail with quite a pleasant name, but the giveaway was in the title of those employed to spray and pump it: veneneros, or for want of a better translation, 'poisoners'
I would be very interested to find out if the industry decreased the pesticide/fungicide load since this was documented. I'm quoting secondhand here, Chapman notes in the 2007 book
> Of the world's food crops, the banana is the most chemically treated (so we depend on its skin's ability to prevent disease)
The story of marketing bananas is such a strange one. The 'Father of Public Relations', Edward Bernays, was heavily involved. There isn't a compelling dietary reason to eat bananas (expect, I suppose, if it's the only thing you've got). They resorted to the same marketing tactics that were used to sell cigarettes.
> "Samuel Crowther...looking back on nearly twenty years later on these early days of United Fruit in his book The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics, what was being discovered was that 'demand is a thing which must be created" (51)
Without getting into too much of a discussion about health and diet... I find that the heuristic that "anything new is bad" seems to work pretty well with food. Trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, factory farms, etc.
The history of bananas shows that the production and demand for the fruit is both very new and completely artificial.
Again, please feel free to draw your own conclusions. The only point to make here is that I found the reading surprisingly fascinating -- a banana is not just a banana.
Bordeaux mixture's pretty nasty stuff, but it's been used on many types of fruits for a couple of centuries, not just bananas. It's also generally approved for use for use in organic growing so it's not easy to avoid - buying organic may actually increase the chance it was used on your fruit.
Bordeaux Mixture is relatively benign. Copper, Sulfur and Lime are all naturally occurring chemicals, which (as you say) have been used to fight fungus for hundreds of years.
Hmmm, unless people are buying bananas and throwing them out, the demand for bananas is real and not artificial. It's a little surprising you group the crop with manufactured consumables like trans-fats and HFCS.
Bananas are one of the oldest agricultural crops known to man (8000 BC) - there's no reason to "go bananas" about them.
The parent is probably referring to the fact that banana demand in the US was manufactured artificially, much in the same way as DeBeers marketing has made the diamond synonymous with luxury, marriage, etc.
There was demand for bananas before, but mostly as a local crop.
It's in Portuguese, but you can find a nice color table in page 7 with fruit and vegetable names (rows) and states (columns) providing an idea (red == bad).
Bananas do better than pretty much anything else tested there.
> Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'
Not even close. Craftsman's marks -- the original trademarks -- are pretty much the original form of branding, and predate banana stickers by by probably on the order of a couple thousand years.
Brand relates to an old Northern European word still in use today. Brand in Dutch and German means fire, the marks were burned into cattle, products and anything else that needed a hard to remove label.
That's all true, but somewhat beside the point. Yes, that's the etymology, but most of those aren't examples of the meaning being discussed, but are instead owner's marks, rather than origin marks.
Related: DamnInteresting did a great article on the history of the banana and its reproductive quirks. It taught me about the historical species of banana that we no longer eat!
It is an ongoing research project. The Gros Michel itself is not gone; there are a number of plants still living, but currently they are trying to deal with the strange banana chromosomes: bananas have three chromosomes -- an odd number!
> It's very hard to genetically modify a plant that doesn't produce any seeds!
Huh? Gene modification in plants is almost always done on individual cells that are then grown into fully-differentiated plants using tissue culture techniques. There are well established protocols for this. Bananas are routinely grown from tissue culture.
Depends on the method. Gene guns work best with embryonic tissue, which is found in the seeds. The Agrobacteria method can use just about any tissue, but doesn't work for all plants.
That article talks about them applying for clinical trials, but I'm pretty sure they don't have the carotene transformed banana plant yet (unless it's unpublished).
Banana trees that's used commercially are cloned by taking off-shoots, and are sterile. It's quite hard, if not impossible, to alter their genetics. Likewise it's hard to breed new banana trees that produce suitable fruits.
If it does go to South America, USA might be screwed. America imports all of it's bananas, Chile mostly. Hawaii makes a negligible amount that I think never even leaves Hawaii.
Side note, I've been interested in fruits, and the fruit trade so I've been trying to find out more information about how it all works. It is hard. Pretty much any hard data that comes out is from the USDA, no private entity does any sort of research or tracking of the movement of fruits. Farmers either don't care about that sort of stuff to do it on their own, or aren't technologically advanced enough to try and do it themselves.
"Pacific Fruit Express" and "The Great Yellow Fleet" are great books on the railroad technology development to provide produce West-to-East. The fast-trading of ripening fruits were redirected several times on their trip east via telegraph commands.
I recently learned about the Breadfruit[1] at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens on the island of Kaua'i.
Apparently, the Polynesians gave up the cultivation of rice (from their native Taiwan) and cultivated the breadfruit instead wherever it grew.
The NTBG is trialing the use of breadfruit to combat starvation in tropical nations[2]: hopefully, in the event of a Bananapocalypse, breadfruit could help alleviate the loss.
"scientists haven’t yet found a viable back-up banana to sub in for the Cavendish"
What? But what about the Goldfinger? I thought that was Race 4 resistant (Wikipedia seems to agree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana ), as well as tastier than the relatively bland Cavendish.
I don't know if they contain as much protein and whatnot, but I found peaches give me a similar "satiated" feeling if I eat them in the morning (in case you'll need an alternative fruit soon).
It's best to eat the bananas when they're still a little green; as they ripen their glycemic index increases. I think the Whole 30 list [0] of recommended fruit is pretty good.
There are dozens of foods that can substitute a banana in the Mediterranean at least.
Banana's do not have proteins. Generally speaking proteins can be found in meat. Banana has 0% cholesterol and big quantities of Potassium and Magnesium which help considerably with muscles (e.g. heart). That's their main benefit nutrition-wise.
Avogado, spinach and sweet potato (boiled/natural) has bigger amounts of Potassium.
Banana's do not have proteins. Generally speaking proteins can be found in meat.
A banana has ~1g - 1.5g of protein. By dried weight, it's a lower % of protein than a lot of other fruits. I admit it isn't much (it's about as much protein as 1 teaspoon of peanut butter).
Almost _everything_ has protein in it. You get your recommended daily intake of protein at around 9 large baked potatoes.
> Generally speaking proteins can be found in meat
That isn't true at all.
And it only brings up the question: Where does the meat get the protein?
Animals can not make protein (or more accurately amino acids), only plants can. (Maybe some microorganisms too? Not sure.) Animals can only rearrange existing amino acids into other amino acids or into proteins.
All plants have protein, some more than others. Grains and legumes have the most of the plants.
Do you realize that you went from animals not being able to synthesize proteins, to not being able to synthesize amino acids to not being able to get nitrogen from sources other than ingested amino acids?
Where will you move the post after you find out about niacin?
A lot of old true-to-seed breeds of plants with diverse sets of attributes (like e.g. being more resistant to certain environmental conditions) haven't been cultivated for economic reasons and consequently have become extinct by now.
There are some enthusiasts trying to preserve those old breeds by running seed-banks but they have a hard time to do so even here in Europe because of corporations like Monsanto and their heavy lobbying trying to outlaw this movement.
Arche Noah:
"In the past 100 years we have lost about 75 percent of agricultural diversity worldwide."
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Related - I was just posting on this topic on the Red Delicious thread which popped up on the HN frontpage:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301185
Edit: I can't see why this gets downvoted, it is clearly on-topic and relevant.