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.

koeppel

Is Your Banana in Danger?