Saturday 22 October 2005

Pic of the day: Delicious sweety bananas are popular even in Japan, as seen in this screenshot from the anime Da Capo 2.

Bananas again

This weekend I once again have delicious golden sweety bananas. They are yellow from end to end, and fairly large. However, they do have a flaw under the skin, making parts of the flesh darker and soft and, at the worst, kinda slimy. So I have to cut away parts of them. Even so, it is a rare sight these days, when most bananas are either green and yellow or yellow and brown or all of the above.

I did some more research on the topic, using the ever helpful google and wikipedia. It turns out that my childhood's bananas were actually superior. When I was small, most of the bananas that made it out of the tropics belonged to a different variety, Gros Michel, which was both larger and better tasting as well as handling the transport better. Alas, this superior banana was all but wiped out by a blight. It still survives in some remote corners of the world, but is no longer grown in quantity for export. Instead it was replaced by the Cavendish, a type more resistant to disease but less tasty and less easy to transport. In recent years, even this banana is falling prey to blight. This may account for the spotty quality of imported bananas, as you basically have to take them where you find them. (Quite aside from the Norwegian downward spiral of buying only the cheapest food available as we get richer and richer.)

The banana is particularly vulnerable because it is seedless and propagated by offshoots from existing plants. So you can't just crossbreed the tasty ones with the disease-resistant ones and keep the offspring that combines the best of the two. Actually, with modern biotechnology you can do that, mixing the genes of two "bloodlines". In theory, you could even get back the good old Gros Michel, if you spliced in or out a couple genes that refer to how they deal with blight. But then you would not be able to sell them. Most of the bananas in the western world is sold not to bio-engineers but to housewives, and you can imagine the outcry. "There is a gene in my banana! It is an affront to GOD and will turn my children into mutant freaks!"

The irony is that the "natural" banana as cultivated by the ancient ones is not just a clone, every one of them, but is also triploid. That is to say, it has 3 sets of chromosomes instead of 2, as pretty much every other organism has. (This is why it is sterile. You would be too, if you were triploid.) It is the most freakish plant ever likely to grace your house, much less your table. But you didn't know that, so you have eaten it cheerfully since before you could even get the number of "na"s right in "banana".

Of course, being a boy, I would probably have eaten MORE of them if I knew how freakish they were. ^_^ And I certainly would if I knew they were headed for extinction.