Seedless . Nutritious . Portable . Tasty . Yellow . You fairly much know what you ’re going to get with a banana . And you should get it before it ’s gone .
Bananas – or more accurately , the Cavendish , a specific type of banana that most of us study to be " the " banana – are an fantastically reproducible fruit . There ’s a ground for that . All Cavendish bananas are clones , and therefore genetically identical to every other Cavendish out there . ( It ’s not rare for fruits to be cloned . Navel orange are also clone , for example . ) And being clones has a big downside – if there ’s a disease that affects one Cavendish , it affects all Cavendish .
Which is why the banana most people eat – and we eat up a pot of them , over 25 pounding of banana tree per American each class ( that ’s the most of any tonic fruit ! ) – are n’t the same bananas that were eaten 50 years ago .
Prior to 1960 , the standard commercial banana tree character was the Gros Michel ( aka " Big Mike " ) , a larger banana character that , by many accounting , was also tasty . But the Gros Michel was susceptible to Panama disease , because of a fungus that attacked the root of banana tree works . Panama disease spread chop-chop through major banana tree orchard , crippling business enterprise and making Gros Michel finish commercially impossible . After billion of dollars of research and development , the Cavendish – which is genetically resistant to Panama disease – became the world ’s top banana .
Could the Cavendish go the way of the dodo and the Gros Michel ? Absolutely . A comparatively new strain of Panama disease , Tropical Race 4 ( " TR4 " ) , can destroy Cavendish crop , and the only known way to stop it is genetic resistance , which the Cavendish ( being a clon ) wo n’t ever prepare . TR4 has already attack banana plantation in Australia , Taiwan , Malaysia , Indonesia , and has circularise to Southeast Asia . Experts believe that it is only a matter of time , perhaps 10 , before TR4 sends the Cavendish down the same way as Big Mike .
