By relying on any one variety of crop, humans make the food supply vulnerable to disease or changes in weather due to the climate crisis. Bananas are big business - $8 billion a year - and with this fruit facing threats like bacterial wilt and Panama disease, the concern over monoculture is understandable. This ensures an identical, seedless fruit, harvest after harvest.įor this reason, bananas serve as an excellent example of one of the criticisms of the genetic engineering of food: Monoculture. Cavendish bananas are easy to grow because they are cultivated from genetically identical plants that grow on the roots of a mother plant.

Today, of the over 1000 varieties of bananas, Cavendish bananas make up more than half of bananas exported to the U.S. After the Cavendish banana arrived in the Canary Islands, it went into large-scale production and never ceased. The bananas we eat today are direct descendants of this British-grown variety first established in the 1830s. Maelon (Melon), in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.The next time you bite carefree through a banana, thank horticulturalist William Cavendish. The apple was early so important, and so generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. Niebuhr observes that 'the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture and the gentler ways of life, agree in Latin and Greek, while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the Greek.' Thus the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. Tacitus says of the ancient Germans that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples, among other things.

An entire black and shrivelled Crab-Apple has been recovered from their stores. It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. The geologist tells us that the order of the Rosaceae, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the Labiatae, or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man.

Wild apples henry david thoreau