Banana

A berry, technically

Botanically, bananas are berries — fleshy fruits with seeds embedded in the flesh, produced from a single ovary. The wild ancestor Musa acuminata is full of hard black seeds; the commercial Cavendish is a sterile triploid hybrid whose tiny brown specks are the remnants of seeds that no longer germinate.

A monoculture problem

Almost every banana eaten in the West is the same variety — Cavendish — and every Cavendish plant is a genetic clone of every other, propagated from rhizome cuttings. This makes the global banana supply uniquely vulnerable to disease.

The Cavendish replaced the previously dominant Gros Michel, which was wiped out commercially in the 1950s by Panama disease. Today, a new strain (Tropical Race 4) is spreading and may force the world to find a successor.

Plant or tree?

Banana plants look like trees but are giant herbs. The “trunk” is a tightly packed bundle of leaf bases, not woody tissue. Each plant produces one bunch of bananas in its life, then is cut down — a new shoot from the rhizome takes its place.

How they ripen

Bananas are climacteric — they continue ripening after harvest. Storing them with apples accelerates ripening (both release ethylene); refrigerating them after ripening preserves the flesh, though the skins blacken from cold damage.