If you get our service then seeing bananas on a daily basis is nothing new. Bananas; as a whole, are somewhat easy to forget about when it comes to thinking about fruit. This is likely why information about bananas seems so alien. Did you know bananas can’t reproduce?
Growing bananas is an interesting game. In this article, the author gives some simple facts about bananas which are easy to overlook but certainly are fascinating.
Somehow, two south asian fruits crossbred to create the banana. One of them has an unpalatable taste while the other has so many seeds it can’t be eaten. These have mutated and changed into what we know today as the banana.
For comparison’s sake, the banana is a lot like a mule in the sense that it’s a hybrid which is unable to reproduce. More specifically, the bananas which we consume commercially do not have seeds inside them. Interesting that the offspring of two inedible fruits becomes the world’s most popular fruit.
What’s challenging about having a sterile fruit is that when pests and disease descend on a crop (which can happen), bananas don’t have a way to reproduce without the aid of human interaction.
Realistically, a banana famine could occur and the ramifications could lead to mass starvation. It’s happened before. In the mid-twentieth century the Gros Michel banana crop fell victim to Panama disease. Panama disease is a fungus which chokes out the trees it grows on, rendering its fruit valueless.
After the Vietnamese Cavendish seemed to save the day in the 1950’s, Panama disease started to make a comeback and now banana farmers and cultivists are concerned that Panama disease could wipe out the Cavendish.
The problem there is that banana cultivists don’t have a backup plan for losing this breed of banana. The article goes into granular detail about the painstaking task of trying to genetically modify bananas into banana trees.
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