maybe we should not eat bananas?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/364179_bananaonline23.html

Wow, I had no idea.  It seems plausible.  Anybody know if this is less than accurate?

If accurate (and it probably is) I think I'm going to eat a lot less bananas.  Besides, eating bananas just supports the long haul industry.

Hmm.
The selfish side of me says 'get em while you can'.

Taking the 'long haul' aspect out of the equation, do you think boycotting would do much good at this point?

If the political stuff is true, then it seems like putting money into bananas has more to it than just a tasty treat.  Kinda creepy. 

The Panama disease is quite real and it started several years ago, but this isn't the first case like this we've seen. Central America is like a comedy of errors with regards to agricultural commodities.

Cacao was grown extensively as a cash crop and now has Monilinia (brown rot). Old cacao orchards can be found all over Central America abandoned. Coffee had always been a staple commodity in Latin America. That is, until Vietnam hit the production market (at the behest of the World Bank) and prices bottomed out causing a lot of Latinos to go out of business. Honey bees have the double whammy of verilla mites and colony collapse.

You can pretty much assume that ANY food product that you can import from overseas cheaper than purchasing something local is eventually going to have problems (whether due to pest & disease issues associated with monocultures or simply bad karma catching up with bad economics).

This is part of what that whole "buy local" thing is all about. It isn't just shunning the long haul industry to save petroleum. It is also about not dumping your negative impacts on the world's poor. In other words, we buy local to keep any negative impacts right here at home where we're the ones who suffer if we don't adopt better practices. Of course this goes for positive impacts as well.

I guess that means if I had to prioritize between buying local and buying organic, I'd put buying local as more important because I know that any associated problems with local produce will be right here at home where the wealthiest people in the world live. Guess who is better equipped to deal with those problems when pressed?

Dave

I snoped it. it appears it only affects one variety, and isn't so grave a threat as proposed. I did however find out that bananas have very little genetic diversity and are vulnerable because of that. Interesting. I had a neighbor that kept his banana trees in the crawl space all winter and brought them out each spring. I can't remember if they ever actually made bananas for him or not.
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/bananas.asp

Snopes always has some really excellent information, although it is almost always incomplete.  Often the picture is far richer than snopes reports.

For example, they generally label stuff as true or false when the truth is almost always that there it is a little of both. 

Thats true. They are certainly not the end all of information but they help counter some hysteria that comes from some extremists. It takes both.

Snopes also seems to have a very particular slant as well, like anyone else. For example, they cite Businessweek Magazine and one plant pathologist to label this entirely false, while the New Scientist and Seattle PI articles only suggested that it was a possibility. Besides, all it would take for store-bought bananas to not be available anymore would be a drop in "economically viability" either from this or transportation costs, since it's not able to be grown in most of the US.

I believe the Seattle PI article does accurately describe the sad sociohistorical background and environmental cost of the banana industry however, something that I certainly wasn't aware about until I did some research on my own. I actually did a presentation on this for an intro to horticulture class when I was in school (sources are at the end if interested in reading more):

http://www.slideshare.net/guestfec3ab/social-implications-of-the-banana-trade-presentation/

I'll endorse that. 

I will look at snopes to see what they think, but I generally take their position with a grain of salt. 

I do seem to recall reading some things on snopes where I felt I knew a great deal and I thought the snopes position was completely wrong. 

And, at the same time, there were some things where I was in complete agreement.

Soon -- in five, 10 or 30 years -- the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist

Written in 2008.

I wonder how it's going?

Bananas have been cheap and always in the shops while I was alive.  Although my parents are old enough to remember it as a seasonal luxury food.

Boxing day, 2018 was the first time I noticed shops had sold out.  I went to several and nope.  It was nearly new years (bad weather contributed)  before I got my banana.

The prices seem to double every few years.  And even in post 2020 life, we still see days when, yes, we have no bananas.



So maybe there is something to it.

My wife eats a lot of bananas. I said I'd heard something about health problems from eating too many, such as hyperkalemia. She reckons she has no issues from eating them.

If it looks like banana, smells like banana, tastes like banana and you found it under a banana tree, it's probably monkey vomit. Here to help folks.

My favourite type of bananas are those mini ones in Hawai'i, they get called "apple bananas" a lot and they're so sweet and delightful!  We don't eat bananas often in our house, my husband eats them occasionally or we put them in fruit smoothies, but not on a regular basis.  Of course if we could get that type then we'd eat wayyyyy more bananas.