Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Better Eat Those Bananas ... While You Still Can
New York Magazine
http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2011/01/better_eat_those_bananas_while.html#comment-list

Think about apples for a second. There are Granny Smiths, Red Delicious, 
Fuji, etc. Now think about bananas. There are just, like, bananas, right? The 
only bananas that Americans eat — and they eat more of them than they do 
apples and oranges combined — are the Cavendish, which is just one variety 
out of at least one thousand. And now, a fungus is threatening to destroy 
pretty much every Cavendish in existence. How real a possibility is it that 
all of our bananas will be wiped out? It already happened once.

This week's New Yorker has a huge story about the banana industry that 
touches on all of the familiar complaints against it: the inherent lack of 
sustainability of their product, companies aiding anti-government military 
forces in banana-growing countries. But what it mostly focuses on is Tropical 
Race Four, a sort of super-fungus that turns Cavendish bananas into mush. So 
scientists are trying to build a better banana! One that is resistant! Here's 
the thing: It doesn't sound like they're making a lot of progress.

One of the most interesting pieces of info in the story is that this already 
happened once. See, the bananas that were originally eaten all over the U.S. 
weren't the Cavendish variety, they were Gros Michel bananas. (They were 
also, by all accounts, far tastier.) But a fungus called Race One, which is 
closely related to Tropical Race Four, wiped them out in the first half of 
the twentieth century. Really, one of the main reasons we have Cavendish 
bananas is because they're resistant to Race One. But it sounds like we might 
not have them for much longer either.

Actually, this whole banana thing has bothered us since we saw a New York 
Times op-ed a few years ago that is VERY similar to this New Yorker one. In 
an age of super-local, sustainable, organic, blah blah blah, how have bananas 
— genetically altered fruit shipped in from tropical climates — managed to 
escape scrutiny? We don't really want to admit this, but we used to be 
convinced that something like heirloom bananas would become the next big 
dessert trend (right about the time this book came out). But then, nothing! 
People just kept on eating Bananas Foster and peanut-butter-and-banana 
sandwiches.

But maybe now's the time for other banana varieties — Some are fuzzy! Some 
have striped skin! — to enter the U.S. market?

We Have No Bananas [NYer]