Every Banana You Eat Is the Same Banana

Bananas are seedless. The yellow ones in the supermarket — the Cavendish — are propagated entirely by cutting and replanting suckers from the parent plant. Every Cavendish on Earth is, genetically, a single individual that's been Xeroxed for decades. That uniformity is why they ship and ripen identically. It is also why they are dying.

This has happened before. Until the 1950s, the world ate the Gros Michel — a sweeter, hardier banana than the Cavendish, with a thicker peel that survived rough transit. Then Fusarium oxysporum race 1, a soil fungus called Panama disease, swept through Central American plantations. By the 1960s the Gros Michel was commercially extinct. United Fruit and its competitors rushed to replace it with the Cavendish, which was immune to race 1 and had been an obscure greenhouse curiosity in Europe.

In 1989, Taiwanese growers identified a new strain: Tropical Race 4. TR4 attacks the Cavendish, persists in soil for 30 years, and travels on a clump of dirt stuck to a boot. Since the 1990s it has spread to the Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, the Middle East, parts of Africa, and — confirmed in 2019 — Colombia. There is no chemical control. Containment means destroying the field.

Resistance work continues. Researchers in Taiwan have developed somaclonal Cavendish variants — GCTCV-218, GCTCV-219 — with partial tolerance, and a Honduran breeding program released a hybrid called Goldfinger years ago that nobody bought because it didn't taste like a banana. The next banana, when it arrives, will probably taste different from the one you grew up with.