Science

Monocrop dangers

Dec

25

Popular Science magazine has a long and fascinating article about the perfect food, the banana. Every supermarket banana produced since the 1960's has been grown from a clone of the same single banana tree. If you know about genetic diversity you might recognize this as a disaster waiting to happen and Popular Science thinks the disaster is happening now. Conventionally produced bananas already require tremendous amount of pesticides and fungicides. But it looks like the way out, at least in the short term, is even more spraying. The article reassures us that the pesticide issue "isn’t so much for banana consumers, at least directly, since most of the substances used on the plants don’t make it into the flesh of the thick-skinned fruit."


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Maybe it doesn't make it to the fruit's flesh, but what about the soil and our water ways!? I'd like to see an article about pesticide, fungicide, and vitamin content in commercial vs. organic bananas.