Dan Koeppel's Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]