Is Your Banana in Danger?

scleaver — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:40:51 -0500

Bananas are in danger, the Slashfood Blog reported on February 24 (The Great Banana Panic Continues). I hadn’t known there was a great banana panic, but apparently, our unyielding desire for the classic, boomerang-shaped yellow fruit is catching up with us. Will bananas be the first great casualty of a global food market?

Dan Koeppel’s new book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World has a bold title, and some bold facts to back it up. Koeppel recently told NPR’s Fresh Air that bananas may be wiped off the planet within decades.

Think you can live without them? We Americans eat more bananas each year than apples; more bananas than oranges; and even when you total the number of apples and bananas we eat that still doesn’t equal our banana consumption, a sobering fact considering that they’re a huge food import.

According to Koeppel (as reported on Slashfood), bananas are currently being “struck by a fungus called Panama Disease, which is incurable and has been known to wipe out banana plantations in a few years.” This isn’t just a fluke of nature. Today’s banana plants are susceptible to Panama Disease because most of the bananas that we, the Chinese, and the Europeans eat are cloned.

Next time you’re at your local supermarket, take a look at the banana display. Every single one of those bananas is genetically identical to the one next to it, so when one gets Panama Disease, they all get it.

To fight Panama Disease, growers are doing the obvious: spraying chemicals to try and stop the disease, toying with genetic modification to see if they can develop resistant strains (which would still be clones).

And, they’re trying the non-obvious: crossing bananas with veggies that are disease-resistant, like radishes. So, what’s in store for our favorite tropical fruit?Well, we may simply have to reduce our banana consumption. Banana pudding, banana bread, bananas over cereal, may become more luxury than necessity. Growing more, or organically, isn’t an option—according to Koeppel, we simply don’t have enough land.

Want more info: Here’s the story on Fresh Air Bananas, a Storied Fruit with an Uncertain Future.Photo Credit: A Lucid Spoonful Blog.

Full Circle

scleaver — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Breaking News: starting soon, if you want, you really can have the exact same steak two days in a row, from two different animals. On January 15, the Washington Post reported that the FDA “concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals.” This at the start of a year that promises to be a big one for food. Two weeks ago, on January 2, the Detroit Free Press outlined three major food trends for ’08:

Varietal Vocab: This year, varietals will be the name of the game. No longer will you eat grapes or turkey, but Gewürztraminers and Narragansetts.

USDA 2008: The American food industry is antiquated and facing consumer unrest thanks to recent recalls. The challenge for you, the consumer, will be to figure out exactly what you’re eating, what’s in it, and what consequences you may suffer.

Locavores Unite: Organic isn’t enough anymore—now we’re looking to get as local as possible too, in the name of our and environmental health. Can you reasonably walk, bike, or drive to the field your corn came from?

The trends for 2008 indicate a backlash against industrial food and force an examination of how we got here at all. Our food system, as we know it, industrialized, standardized, and international, started more than 75 years ago when John Tyson moved to Springdale, AR in 1931 and started a business hauling local farmers’ fruit, chickens, and hay to nearby markets. Throughout the 1930s, Tyson expanded his reach, bringing chickens as far away as Detroit and Houston, and growing his chicken business by buying chick hatcheries and commercial feed companies. Eventually, his model—a vertically integrated business, mass producing and mass processing food—became the norm and by 2001, Tyson Foods Inc, was processing (read: slaughtering) more than 2.2 billion chickens a year, according to Ken Midkiff’s The Meat You Eat. Add to that, genetically modified crops from soybeans to tomatoes that are bred to be pesticide and insect resistant, not necessarily more nutritious. And the concerns over raising meat that ends up in our bodies in huge CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), large buildings with animals packed so tightly that they use antibiotics to keep infections at bay and clip beaks so that they don’t eat each other alive. Enter E Coli outbreaks, mad cow disease scares, and antibiotic resistance, and the 2008 food safety trend.

Tyson’s long-distance treks caught on, too. University of Iowa researchers found that the average carrot travels 1,838 miles from farm to market, a long way for a root vegetable that can be grown in local soil. Well-traveled food has the unintended consequence of standardizing the food we eat, cutting out varietals that aren’t as desirable for whatever reason (they don’t ship as well,perhaps). Now, though it may not seem like it in the supermarket, our food choices have narrowed to a few mass-grown varieties. It’ll be interesting to see which lesser known varietals come back in 2008.

The ultimate backlash is locavores. 2008, if it really ends up being the year of the locavore, we could be heading back to a pre-1930s era, before Tyson’s first trip into town with chickens in tow. We could be heading back to the family farm, with communities supplying communities, and that would bring us full circle—from locally supported agriculture, to industrial machine, and back again. That means, we’re heading away from cloned meat, genetically modified foods, and importing anything and everything. It could be a very good year.