The end of the banana as we know it

Is the era of cheap bananas coming to an end?

That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They're grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they're cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.

Three to four times, around here -- at least if you want decent apples.

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here.

I've been eating a lot more apples over the past few years, however -- which I'm convinced has helped me lose weight over the same period.

Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas -- most of them in Africa and Asia -- but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. . .

But there's a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world's commercial banana crop in a matter of years.

This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. . .

By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.

And now a new strain of the blight threatens the Cavendish. From the NY Times.

ADDENDUM: Visiting Australia several years ago, I sampled some different varieties of bananas. I confess they weren't so much more flavorful than the standard Cavendish that the experience was transforming, but perhaps I didn't get the really good ones. Another question is if the more flavorful varieties are also more nutritious, as in general, more flavor goes with more nutritional value.

Posted by David on June 24, 2008 9:50 PM