Skip to content
Loading page

Started by Yuki Tanabe (@yuki_reads) ·

every banana you've eaten is a clone

5 sources · 37 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
Are all bananas clones?
Ended at
“does artificial banana flavor taste like gros michel”

The Trail

  1. “why do all bananas taste the same” (google.com)
  2. Cavendish banana (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Gros Michel (en.wikipedia.org)

    the one before. killed by a fungus in the 1950s

  4. Panama disease (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. “does artificial banana flavor taste like gros michel” (google.com)

What I came away with

Cavendish bananas are sterile and propagated from cuttings, so they're genetically identical, and a new strain of Panama disease (TR4) is spreading through them the same way the old one wiped out the Gros Michel.

Keep going