Bananas!

[tagryn]

It's one of those things we take for granted: you go to any supermarket or convenience store, there'll be bananas there for sale. This article in Popular Science goes into the recent history of the fruit, and how botanists are trying to stave off what could be a repeat of a devastating fungal infection which destroyed the most common variety of banana used prior to the 1920s, and a new variation of which can infect the banana that we use today.

Comments

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Ah, the eternal perils of monoculture. And people wonder what's wrong with it, and why we can't have eternally uniform produce...

Sounds like the potato blight all over again. Like this banana blight, it, too, started in the Pacific. You can trace its progress over a decade, until bam! it hit Ireland, creating vast suffering. Ironically, potatos were still abundant along the west coast of the Pacific, enough they were being used as ballast in sailing ships coming up from Peru. Why? Because they were different varieties from the common cultivar. (Based on problems I've seen with russets, lately, I am expecting a repeat of potato blight---fortunately, we now have a variety of potatos in cultivation.)

This might account for some of the other bananas I've been seeing showing up in the stores (which I actually prefer, in most cases).