In Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, he talks about a forest, I believe it was in Iran, that was the birthplace of a number of fruits, including cherries, apples and plums. That forest still contains nature's experimental duds – apples that weren’t sweet enough, cherries that weren’t big enough - the strains that didn’t multiply and prosper, but were part of the process of getting to the plants that give us fruits that were sweet, juicy and varied. Somewhere along the line, though, we traded variety for profit. Fruits and vegetables that ripened less quickly, had uniform size and color and were unblemished sold better in the supermarket. Consumers came to have certain expectations of produce that had nothing to do with taste or nutrition, and so uniformity took precedence over variety.

Dan Koeppel’s fascinating article on bananas is a great example of how our expectations about produce have lead us to single strain breeding based on appearance.

The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction. For scientists, the battle to resuscitate the world’s favorite fruit has begun—a race against time that just may be too late to win. -- Popsci.com

This monoculture breeding has led to vulnerabilities in the food supply from diseases and pests, which has in turn led to the prevalence of genetic modification to try to mitigate the effects of single strain breeding. Trying to conquer nature to suit our needs and expectations seems to be a Pandora’s box, but the technology and the abilities we believe it affords us seem too tempting to forego. And I must admit, that imagining a scientist crossing a banana with a radish to create a blight resistant crop that still tastes like a banana is pretty fascinating.

Bananas have a long and varied history. Cultivated by humans for more than 15,000 years, they are one of the oldest cultivated crops. They also made rich men of western banana plantation owners that took over large swaths of Central America, propping up corporate friendly “Banana Republics” along the way. The banana that we know and love is called a Cavendish and is actually one of more than 300 types of bananas. In the U.S. we aren’t familiar with any of those other bananas. That’s because the Cavendish was perfect for U.S. markets. It didn’t ripen too quickly, stayed firm and had a uniform taste and size. It was actually a replacement for another strain of banana, the Gros Michel, that was wiped out from blight in the 1960’s. Now the Cavendish is being threatened by a new strain of the same Panama disease. Koeppel, who is also the author of “Banana; the Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World” said on the NPR show “The Splendid Table” recently that the Cavendish may be completely wiped out in the places where it is currently cultivated in the next 5 years.

This stress on the banana population poses a major threat in Africa where 20 million people depend on bananas as their main food staple. And although they are growing different types of bananas, the uniformity of so much of the crop has made all banana crops susceptible to increased disease. To keep from losing bananas completely, we have a few choices: diversify to grow other banana types, grow the Cavendish in new areas that won’t yet have the disease, find a single strain replacement for the Cavendish that is resistant to the current blight through cross-breeding or genetically modify the Cavendish to be blight resistant.

Some believe the biotech method could be fastest in terms of finding a way to save the Cavendish. But is it the best? According to Koeppel’s article, “82 percent of U.K. shoppers said they would never buy a genetically altered banana, even if proven to be safe, even if doing so allowed the elimination of pesticides and other potentially harmful agricultural chemicals -- a major advantage, supporters say, of biotech crops.” And currently, the Cavendish trees need to be sprayed almost weekly with adverse health effects for workers and the environment, if not for consumers as growers maintain that the pesticides don’t make it into the flesh of the banana. To date, however, biotech claims of reducing pesticide use through genetic modification have proven to be unfounded -- in fact, pesticide usage has increased.

The problems with genetic modification are many; we don’t know the long term health effects on consumers, we don’t know the effects on other populations, like bees, bats and other pollinators, and we don’t know the long term effects on the overall health of the produce itself. Conventional breeding may not yield much better results if we continue to search out yet another single strain to replace this one -- just so consumers can keep their expectations of uniform, unblemished produce. Moving plantations to currently disease free areas is a temporary solution at best and runs the risk of bringing blight to subsistence crops in those areas and risking massive famine and destabilization.

The real answer, like with most things, may very well be restoring genetic diversity. What if the banana in your smoothie had red skin instead of yellow? What if bananas were just 3 inches long instead of 7? What if we got to know some new strains of fruit, just like we’ve gotten to know and love the Fuji apple as an alternative to Macintosh, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious? What if our expectation was for a fruit that tasted delicious instead of just focusing on appearance and uniformity?

Nature loves diversity, perhaps we should learn to love it too.