| « Laurell Hamilton's "Anita Blake" books | Apparently I really am a financial naif » |
The end of the commercial banana
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Interesting article on the banana from the New York Times covering its history (political, genetic) and future (environmental, political, genetic.)
(Via Matthew Yglesias)
2 comments
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOQ!!!!
There aren’t too many strains of Musa (banana) that are particularly tasty. So many are starchy.
The bananas in Uganda - I never even saw any of them ripen. They were present in nearly every front yard when we were there. They were always taken green to make matoke - which is very starchy but does actually have a decent banana aroma to it which comes out when used with the thin peanut sauce they seem to eat with it.
The bananas in Thailand are pretty decent, though small. If Cavendish dies, we may still have some different stock to go from.
Hopefully it doesn’t end up in the same sort of situation as the elm, or worse.
Never pays to have a monoculture, but that tends to happen when you get a good hybrid variety. Hybrids don’t breed true, so you need to vegetatively propagate them to get their good qualities, and that means a lot of clones - nasty when disease strikes.
As amusing as they are, I don’t think North Americans would be pleased to have to fall back on the likes of Musa velutina
(I’d still like to grow them, though, dagnabbit, even just for all the fuzzy pink banana jokes)
