Natural News posts alarming but, factually inacurate article on bananas.

Originally posted by boncho
reply to post by XmikaX

 

The banana plant is a hybrid, originating from the mismatched pairing of two South Asian wild plant species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana.

Between these two products of nature, the former produces unpalatable fruit flesh, and the latter is far too seedy for enjoyable consumption.

Nonetheless, these closely related plants occasionally cross-pollinate and spawn seedlings which grow into sterile, half-breed banana plants.

What gets me about this is; if the current variety of banana is endangered, why don't they go back to the original source and cross breed the two musa plants until they come up with a new variety of palatable banana plant to replace the Cavendish if it goes the way of the dinosaur?


I doubt I'm the only one who thought of this and I hope someone is pursuing this avenue so my grand-kids won't have to grow up in a world with no bananas.

. The things I don't know about bananas...or almonds. What other fruit surprises await me?

reply to post by FortAnthem


Here is a good history and a possible future for the bannana as we know it.

From what I gather from the article, it is not so much the banana that is threatened at the moment, but the type of banana that we are used to that is threatened.


As far as some radical genome project going on (far-fetched to say the least), it seems the certain type of banana we like is susceptible to disease. But of course, there are hundreds of others:

In an area about the size of a U.S. shopping mall, Aguilar, 46, is growing more than 300 banana varieties. Most commercial growing facilities handle just a single banana type-the one we Americans slice into our morning cereal.

A "banana apocalypse" has already happened years ago:

A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there's already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or "Big Mike," accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest.

As Darwin said....


Survival of the fruitiest?


erm...