The most controversial part of my book is my assertion that biotech is key to saving the banana. I came by this assertion with a lot of difficulty – initially believing that most genetic engineering in our food supply was a bad thing. But, as usual, the issue isn’t black and white. With bananas, the shade of gray is especially green.
Read the piece here.
First good. Second, not so good.
More or less, maybe, according to the May issue of the science/tech/culture publication, because:
GMO agriculture may have a smaller carbon footprint than traditionally grown crops.
Organics may have a larger carbon footprint than traditionally grown crops.
In my book, I note that the promise of organic bananas is far less than we’d wish it to be – and the potential of GM bananas has been so undervalued (and so feared) as to be a factor in creating hunger in banana-dependent populations worldwide, as well as contributing to the reduction of genetic diversity in the global banana crop.
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Don’t blame the cute l’il ethylene molecule.
The “miracle” – if you want to call it that – of the banana industry is that it manages to transport a fragile fruit thousands of miles and still get it to your supermarket green, ready to fully ripen (“flecked with brown,” as the Chiquita jingle says) in exactly seven days. For over a century, this has been accomplished by controlling the atmosphere that surrounds the bananas in transport.
When fruit ripens, it gives off ethylene gas. Ethylene is a naturally-occurring substance, emitted as fruits ripen, and providing a sort of on-off switch to let other fruits nearby “know” when to ripen. (That’s why bananas ripen so evenly across a bunch.) It is also the “world’s most commonly produced organic compound,” according to a Science Daily report. Fruit distributors keep “ripening rooms,” where levels of ethylene can be controlled to hasten or delay ripening.
The report also notes that the current way industrial ethylene is generated for those ripening rooms (as well as dozens of other uses, including as a mecical anesthetic) releases a “miasma of greenhouse gasses.” (Sigh.) But scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab have recently come up with a new way to produce the gas via creating a high-temperature membrane that blocks the release of greenhouse gasses, allowing only harmless hydrogen to get through.
The “Fort Knox of Food.” From the International Herald Tribune.
The recent publicity about the opening of the “Global Seed Vault” in Longyearbyen, Norway, has prompted some questions about whether or not bananas are included. The vault is 500 meters deep, buried under a snow-capped mountain, and is filled with over a hundred million (!!!) different kinds seeds, all as a hedge against the predicted destruction to plant life global warming may be about to wreak. The project was described as a “backup hard drive” for agriculture by the New York Times (story). But bananas aren’t included. Why?
Simple: bananas don’t have seeds. And banana plantlets – the primary means of storing genetic material for the fruit – are an impossible fit for the Norwegian project, which can only store the so-called “orthodox” seeds – the kind that can be preserved dry. Storing bananas, as a recent press release from Bioversity International noted, need “human intervention. That’s always been the story with bananas. We brought them from the forest thousands of years ago, and we’ve carried them around the world. They aren’t just a product of human enterprise – they’re a companion to humanity.
Liquid nitrogen keeps the banana materials at minus 320 degrees fahrenheit (-196 degrees c.)
So, is there a banana bank account out there, working as a hedge against disaster? Yes – it is called the “Black Box” collection, stored at the French Research Institute for Development, in Montpellier, France. The tissue samples there duplicate of those stored at the International Transit Center at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium; that institution is one of the leading center for banana genetic research. “It’s a mirror of the need for crop diversity itself,” Emile Frison, Bioversity’s Director General, said. “Just as humanity needs different varieties of crops, so different crops need different kinds of long-term storage.”
That’s good news for bananas, which face many present-day external attackers – diseases and pests especially virulent to the fruit, which suffers from declining genetic diversity – that are as destructive as the doomsday scenarios contemplated by the ice mountain project.
(This story is based on a press release from Bioversity. Read it in its entirety here – it includes the story of how the Black Box works, and why bananas require unique storage techniques.)
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recommends it.
Listen to my interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air.
Read my own op-ed in The New York Times.
You can get a really good sense of what the book is about from this Huffington Post story.
You can buy it: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Indiebound Independent Booksellers Search Books-A-Million / Booksense.com / Powells.com
Signed copies, $24.95 (including US shipping.)
Visit her website.