Like many folks, I remember a different kind of banana from my youth. The skin was thinner, I think, and they were easier to “open” then the current Cavendish variety, which seem to require me to score them with a fingernail before they will give up their goodness.
Apparently my youth-banana has all but vanished. And there is fear that the same will happen to the Cavendish as well. My question is… how? Assuming it’s some sort of blight, couldn’t we isolate some small percentage of them from this banana-geddon, and then re-introduce them once the blight has died out? Or is that not feasible for some reason?
The Gros Michel you probably remember is not extinct, but it is susceptible to Panama Disease. It can’t be brought back in bulk because the disease still exists.
The Gros Michel banana, the most popular variety up through the 1950s, was virtually eliminated by Panama disease (fusarium wilt), a disease spread by a soil-borne pathogen. The Cavendish was basically immune to that, at the time, so replaced the Gros Michel as the dominant strain in commerce. In recent years, however, a different strain of Panama disease has emerged and the Cavendish is vulnerable to the so-called “Tropical Race 4” of fusarium, currently devastating plantations worldwide.
The banana-producing nations have all instituted stringent quarantine controls to prevent the spread; fusarium usually spreads through contaminated soil (and so by everything from planting equipment to truck tires). Also, it can be spread when suckers from infected plants are used to start a new plantation or growing area; since commercial bananas don’t reproduce naturally, growers use clones or suckers, and those grown from tissue cultures don’t spread the disease but are much more expensive. Animals can also track the spores, and they can be spread by water run-off. That means you need really tight controls that everybody follows; even one slip-up can allow the disease to gain a foothold. Gros Michel survives in some greenhouses, and Cavendish could as well, but the pathogen is very widespread and not readily wiped out, so reintroduction would not work. It’s not like some other diseases that survive only in specific hosts, and will die if they don’t have a suitable host; the spores can exist for many years until a suitable environment is available.
I ordered some Gros Michel bananas from an on-line seller out of Florida a few days ago. I’m not sure when I am going to get them and they offered several varieties of bananas. (I also ordered some Hidden Rose apples)
Please verify something for me once you receive them. I’ve been told, perhaps by my father (it was quite some time ago) that the artificial banana flavoring tastes like the Gros Michel bananas, not the Cavendish variety. After you taste your fruit, post here if that fruit does, in fact, taste like the fake banana flavoring. Thanks in advance!
Personally, I’d like to try a Gros Michel to see if their skins are as slippery as the slapstick routines suggest. I never found the Cavendish type to be that slippery.
That’s also what I’ve heard. This article says it’s not because artificial banana flavouring was intentionally designed to resemble the Gros Michel; it’s because one particular chemical compound that is cheap to produce is typically used for banana flavour, and it happens to be closer to the Gros Michel than the Cavendish (while still being close enough to the Cavendish to evoke banana associations for people who’ve only ever had that variety).
To answer this bit- there are tissue culture labs which aim to preserve as many banana varieties as possible long term. We have this bit fairly well covered.
One big problem is Fusarium is a pretty complex fungus- there’s hundreds of types, and they’re everywhere in the soil. This isn’t usually a problem, as most of them are harmless, and just break down dead plant material, but they’re prone to developing pathogenic strains- there’s evidence that the strain that affected Gros Michel and the new strain affecting Cavendish have both evolved from different harmless forms, and they’re far from the only problem Fusarium strains.
Eliminating just the current problem strains would involve sterilizing the soil (sometimes effectively swamping them out with competing harmless fungi/bacteria may work), as they can survive a long time dormant with no host crop- some can even revert to living on dead plant material in the soil, and live indefinitely there with no host, even spreading.
Basically, wiping out the current problem strains could be mindbogglingly difficult and expensive, given the size of area infected, and even if we did manage that, odds are that new strains are going to keep popping up.
Bananas are indigenous to India and the variety you mention is still available and popular there. Most Asian countries (and South America) have a variety of bananas available.
It’s like beer, lots of different varieties but commercially the ones easiest to grow and transport are produced in bulk. I grow a few different varieties in my backyard. Depending on where you live (growing zone), you can grow some too.
Trials of a strain of Cavendish bananas genetically modified to resist the fungus have been successful thus far in Australia. So it should be possible to do that for other varieties of edible bananas. Conventional breeding techniques to incorporate disease resistance in popular edible types are hampered (or impossible) because they’re sterile.
I’d be happy to try other varieties of bananas not yet commercially available, even if they had seeds (something for me to plant!), but I heavily doubt that U.S. and European consumers (for instance) would accept even minimally seedy bananas.