Daikloktos posted:

A few years ago my sister and I were reminiscing over a playthrough of Donkey Kong 64, a game I'd spent countless hours of our youth exploring in novel 3D but had been revealed by time as a plodding incoherent scavenger hunt, a position she had always held. I remarked to her "Imagine how bad it'd suck if you lived in the Soviet Union, stood in line three hours in the snow for this game, and this was your only game like it". She replied "I mean, I guess I'd loving love it in that case. Hahahahah, wow, maybe communism has its advantages" That thought has stuck with me ever since - that a lack of overinundation retains your perspective to appreciate what you have. It's truly vast cosmic irony that a bunch of tree apes developed over million of years to put in my hands this amusement - not even key to survival and perpetuation - of manipulating flashing lights to inhabit an entirely alien world. Against such a sweep does it matter that I could be fractionally more stimulated by Banjo-Kazooie? Only in that I know it.

Daikloktos posted:

eSports Chaebol posted:

Eat bananas while you can. We grow them by clones and have aggressively artificially selected them so there’s only like a dozen genomes left in the entire banana gene pool

Platystemon posted:

‘Cavendish’ itself may not be on the shelves forever. Up to a quarter of banana growers’ expenses go toward controlling the black sigatoka fungus. Organic farmers spend even more money slashing and burning virgin rainforest to create a temporarily sterile environment in which they can grow an Organic® crop. Once the fungus inevitably moves in, they spray shiploads of fungicide everywhere, give up their organic certification on the property, and cut down more rainforest elsewhere to meet the demand for ~organic~ nanners.

Daikloktos posted:

I enjoyed the whole post of course, but especially this since I only understood slash and burn farming from the fertilization angle. To continue to be totally out of my depth, exactly how far-off science fiction is genetic companies cracking fungus-resistant bananas? Is that the sort of thing that might conceivably happen in my lifetime?

World War Mammories posted:

I would've got 100% on dk64, except there was a bug where if you didn't collect some banana medals in the final level before exiting the room, they became incorporeal and you could never collect them again. then like a year later I did it all again and was careful to get those medals. essentially I got 101% twice. the residual psychic trauma is a part of why I am so hosed up today. ama

Platystemon posted:

The banana defender has logged on.

That photo is ’shopped.

There is a real cultivar called ‘Blue Java’ that does produce blueish bananas. They can look like this:



They can also look only as blue as this:



Nearly all of the plants sold as ‘Blue Java’ in the United States are actually an unrelated cultivar because a wholesaler mixed them up and retailers pass on the bad identification. I think that variety, ‘Namwah’, is the one in the ’shopped photo. It’s a fine banana in its own right. Neither of them taste at all like vanilla ice cream to my palate.

If you’re ever in a market in a tropical area, do try some of the local bananas. They may not taste like vanilla ice cream, but they also do not taste like the supermarket variety, ‘Cavendish’.

‘Cavendish’ itself may not be on the shelves forever. Up to a quarter of banana growers’ expenses go toward controlling the black sigatoka fungus. Organic farmers spend even more money slashing and burning virgin rainforest to create a temporarily sterile environment in which they can grow an Organic® crop. Once the fungus inevitably moves in, they spray shiploads of fungicide everywhere, give up their organic certification on the property, and cut down more rainforest elsewhere to meet the demand for ~organic~ nanners.

At farmer’s markets, you might also find the ‘Gros Michel’, the banana that launched a thousand coups. Many people think it’s extinct, but it’s not. It is no longer the foundation of the banana republic, but it is still grown on a decent scale in Southeast Asia and on small farms throughout the tropics.

Daikloktos posted:

It's wild how sterile and assembly-line uniform we've crafted this fruit. I guess you can look at the Dachshund for a wilder trip over generational husbandry but there's always something compelling about food mysticism, whether it be the channer obsessed with soybeans as why there's such trans visibility these days or the corporations hoping their new miracle berry goes over as hard as the one three years ago. Plus nobody's ever knocked over a government to keep the weiner dogs flowing.

World War Mammories posted:

I would've got 100% on dk64, except there was a bug where if you didn't collect some banana medals in the final level before exiting the room, they became incorporeal and you could never collect them again. then like a year later I did it all again and was careful to get those medals. essentially I got 101% twice. the residual psychic trauma is a part of why I am so hosed up today. ama

really queer Christmas posted:

I got every single collectible and every single thing in that game... except for one golden banana - the banana from lanky rematching the bunny. I spent hours trying to get it and gave up.

Platystemon posted:

The banana defender has logged on.

really queer Christmas posted:

I got every single collectible and every single thing in that game... except for one golden banana - the banana from lanky rematching the bunny. I spent hours trying to get it and gave up. I never got it and now I wander the world hoping Bernie gets that hen.

Stairmaster posted:

Daikloktos posted:

I enjoyed the whole post of course, but especially this since I only understood slash and burn farming from the fertilization angle. To continue to be totally out of my depth, exactly how far-off science fiction is genetic companies cracking fungus-resistant bananas? Is that the sort of thing that might conceivably happen in my lifetime?

quote:

The highest pollination success for the EAHB cultivars was expressed by cultivar “Nakabululu” (34.3%) (Nakabululu clone set) with an average of 1.5 seeds per pollinated bunch

quote:

“We never left traditional breeding,” a spokesman for Chiquita told me. “In our core markets, in America and Europe, a genetically modified banana would never be marketable. At the end of the day, we’re interested in continuing to sell bananas.” Jorge Gonzales, Dole’s senior vice-president of agricultural research, said, “Traditional breeding is getting closer. This may be a shot in the dark, but if you don’t take the shot you’ve got absolutely zero chance of hitting the target.”

Platystemon posted:

banana post

Platystemon posted:

The great threats to the West’s favourite fruit are, in the final sense, ignorance and greed.

T-man posted:

can you use a banana as a buttplug, this is kind of time sensitive so please answer soon

Platystemon posted:

The idea that companies will develope fungus‐resistant bananas is fiction, but not for the reason you think.

First let’s talk about banana genetics. The joke about bananas is that they haven’t had sex for ten thousand years. There is a kernel (that’s a pun) of truth to that. Edible cultivars are sterile, almost by definition.

‘Gros Michel’ could not be bred with ‘Cavendish’ to get something that’s resistant to Panama disease.

However, the forebears of edible bananas were not sterile. We can go to the wild relatives of the domestic banana, breed within each species for fungus resistance, cross two species to get a seedless hybrid, and see how it performs. We’re not modifying a known tasty variety to be resistant to fungus; we’re pulling a slot machine handle and hoping to get something that tastes good and grows well.

Sexual reproduction is great, but there is another way. Clones can diverge through mutations. This can be accelerated with the atomic gardening that gave us the ruby red grapefruit (no, really), but it happens through the centuries regardless.

At around the time the (western) Roman Empire was a going concern, someone in the area of the African Great Lakes obtained a single banana plant. In the centuries since, bananas have flourished in the region. There are now some two hundred cultivars. The majority are picked green and prepared somewhat like a potato, steamed and mashed. There are at least a dozen cultivars that are specialised for beer‐making, the banana equivalent of cider apples. Ugandans eat a quarter tonne of bananas per person per year.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sK2MStmxWM

Here is what it looks like to make banana beer the traditional way. It’s more fun.

Despite the great culinary diversity displayed by East African highland bananas (EAHB), they remain extremely close genetically. Threats to the West’s favourite snack the Cavendish get all the press, but an epidemic in East African highland bananas could be this century’s potato famine.

Scientists in Uganda are working on diversifying EAHBs by finding fertile mutants.


To be clear, a “bunch” of bananas is the entire crop of one plant, not the “hand” they’re broken into at retail. So it’s like finding a needle in a haystack even with the best candidates.



Uganda isn’t the only nation reliant on bananas. Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, China, India, Indonesia, the United States, France (in Guadeloupe), Brazil, and Honduras also have breeding programmes.

So why did I say that companies weren’t going to create fungus‐resistant bananas?

Simple: these are all national efforts.

Let’s ask the big fruit companies what they think about research and development.

David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs said in 2003, “We supported a breeding program for forty years, but it wasn’t able to develop an alternative to Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back.” concluding “We concentrate on research into fungicides now.”

Oh dear.

Since then, they’ve backpedaled a little.


Chiquita may say they “never left traditional breeding” but they did sell their program to the government of Honduras. It has since had success.

Their first public release was FHIA‐01 ‘Goldfinger’. Some people think this will be the heir to Cavendish.



There are several contenders. FHIA‐17 has ‘Gros Michel’ for a parent.

Another way forward is genetic modification. This is faster than breeding and produces more consistent results, but like the Chiquita guy said, it spooks Western consumers. There is still a way to use modern biotech in a limited way by breeding bananas the old fashioned way, then looking at their genes and seeing how they turned out in important areas. This saves a lot of time over putting seeds in the ground and waiting till they mature.

It was incredibly stupid for the big fruit companies to shutter their breeding programmes.

Ugandans cannot afford to be so precious about their food. They’re genetically modifying bananas to be a better source of vitamin A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUUpi7LHBbc

There is western‐funded opposition to GMOs, but it’s tough to argue against “not going blind”.

Here’s a trial of a fungus‐resistant strain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TvpXKplns

They are using genetic modification to protect the crop they need to survive.

The great threats to the West’s favourite fruit are, in the final sense, ignorance and greed.

Platystemon posted:

The idea that companies will develope fungus‐resistant bananas is fiction, but not for the reason you think.

First let’s talk about banana genetics. The joke about bananas is that they haven’t had sex for ten thousand years. There is a kernel (that’s a pun) of truth to that. Edible cultivars are sterile, almost by definition.

‘Gros Michel’ could not be bred with ‘Cavendish’ to get something that’s resistant to Panama disease.

However, the forebears of edible bananas were not sterile. We can go to the wild relatives of the domestic banana, breed within each species for fungus resistance, cross two species to get a seedless hybrid, and see how it performs. We’re not modifying a known tasty variety to be resistant to fungus; we’re pulling a slot machine handle and hoping to get something that tastes good and grows well.

Sexual reproduction is great, but there is another way. Clones can diverge through mutations. This can be accelerated with the atomic gardening that gave us the ruby red grapefruit (no, really), but it happens through the centuries regardless.

At around the time the (western) Roman Empire was a going concern, someone in the area of the African Great Lakes obtained a single banana plant. In the centuries since, bananas have flourished in the region. There are now some two hundred cultivars. The majority are picked green and prepared somewhat like a potato, steamed and mashed. There are at least a dozen cultivars that are specialised for beer‐making, the banana equivalent of cider apples. Ugandans eat a quarter tonne of bananas per person per year.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sK2MStmxWM

Here is what it looks like to make banana beer the traditional way. It’s more fun.

Despite the great culinary diversity displayed by East African highland bananas (EAHB), they remain extremely close genetically. Threats to the West’s favourite snack the Cavendish get all the press, but an epidemic in East African highland bananas could be this century’s potato famine.

Scientists in Uganda are working on diversifying EAHBs by finding fertile mutants.


To be clear, a “bunch” of bananas is the entire crop of one plant, not the “hand” they’re broken into at retail. So it’s like finding a needle in a haystack even with the best candidates.



Uganda isn’t the only nation reliant on bananas. Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, China, India, Indonesia, the United States, France (in Guadeloupe), Brazil, and Honduras also have breeding programmes.

So why did I say that companies weren’t going to create fungus‐resistant bananas?

Simple: these are all national efforts.

Let’s ask the big fruit companies what they think about research and development.

David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs said in 2003, “We supported a breeding program for forty years, but it wasn’t able to develop an alternative to Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back.” concluding “We concentrate on research into fungicides now.”

Oh dear.

Since then, they’ve backpedaled a little.


Chiquita may say they “never left traditional breeding” but they did sell their program to the government of Honduras. It has since had success.

Their first public release was FHIA‐01 ‘Goldfinger’. Some people think this will be the heir to Cavendish.



There are several contenders. FHIA‐17 has ‘Gros Michel’ for a parent.

Another way forward is genetic modification. This is faster than breeding and produces more consistent results, but like the Chiquita guy said, it spooks Western consumers. There is still a way to use modern biotech in a limited way by breeding bananas the old fashioned way, then looking at their genes and seeing how they turned out in important areas. This saves a lot of time over putting seeds in the ground and waiting till they mature.

It was incredibly stupid for the big fruit companies to shutter their breeding programmes.

Ugandans cannot afford to be so precious about their food. They’re genetically modifying bananas to be a better source of vitamin A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUUpi7LHBbc

There is western‐funded opposition to GMOs, but it’s tough to argue against “not going blind”.

Here’s a trial of a fungus‐resistant strain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TvpXKplns

They are using genetic modification to protect the crop they need to survive.

The great threats to the West’s favourite fruit are, in the final sense, ignorance and greed.