Banana

[Sea Star]

Oooh. An old thread with old me in it.

 

[EastEnder]

It's kinda spooky looking back through a thread that predates "likes". I've got so used to seeing those little symbols of approval, it makes an old thread look curmudgeonly & unloved. (((thread)))

 

[Sea Star]

This is also the finest banana poll thread I've found.

Fine work, op.

I'm proud to be part of it

 

[crossthebreeze]

I'm pretty sure I heard recently that there are at least two main varieties; but they're heavily geographically condensed / confined.

So if there was a banana crisis, it would wipe out a very large part of the stock; but not necessarily all.

Two banana diseases, however, could be fatal.

This is also the finest banana poll thread I've found.

Fine work, op.

There was a banana crisis in the 1950s - until then a cultivar called Gros Michel was widely grown commercially. It was sweeter and tastier than bananas today - banana flavouring was based on it, which is why banana flavoured stuff doesn't taste like bananas do no. Then it they got almost wiped out by fusarium wilt fungus.

So growers found that a banana cultivar called Cavendish (actually bred in England at Chatsworth House) was immune to the fungus, so that's been the main type of banana grown for export since then.

But now there's a new strain of fusarium wilt which Cavendish bananas - and several other cultivars - are not immune to. So there's now several big hybridisation and genetic engineering programs aimed at finding new cultivars. Bananas are susceptible to disease because they are cloned, as cultivars without big seeds (which the original species have) are nicer to eat, but this means that there is no genetic diversity within crops. So we might lose bananas as we know them at some point in the future!

 

[Wookey]

I eat so many I shit like Guy the Gorilla.