Beware the banana skins in global food production

There I was, cleaning the kitchen worktops listening to Radio Four’s Food Programme and a whole new realm of knowledge surrounding the banana opened up before me.

Not many people may know that the banana is the most popular fruit in the world. In Britain alone 140 million bananas are eaten every week, which amounts to a veritable mountain of skins as more than seven billion bananas are consumed in one year. Quite an outstanding figure but what really caught my attention was the origins of all those bananas.

The banana is one of the oldest tropical fruits and has been cultivated from prehistoric times. Think of a banana and you will most probably conjure up a vision of sun-kissed white sands in some tropical paradise where the fruit grows naturally, swaying from trees. Though in my case I imagine friends’ garden tucked away in the urban sprawl behind Le Hocq where a sheltered corner allows them to grow their own!

You will likely be as surprised as yours truly to learn that bananas grown commercially around the world are descended from a single plant. That very plant was grown in 1834 in the Derbyshire Dales, in the magnificent gardens of the majestic Chatsworth House, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire and the Cavendish family, from whom those seven billion bananas we consume every year takes its name.

In those times, the heyday of the great country houses when plant collectors were scouring the globe for unusual plants and produce to grow back home in rarefied conditions, only the rich could afford to indulge in such practices. Now the banana is cheap and available in abundance. It fell to the sixth Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, Joseph Paxton, to cultivate a plant from a fruit gifted by the Chaplain at Alton Towers – long before it became a bare-knuckles rides amusement park.

Although there are 1,200 types of bananas, we only eat one as the Cavendish dwarf (Chinese) banana – which was adopted globally for mass production in the aftermath of the Second World War – today accounts for 99% of international consumption.

This meteoric rise of a tropical fruit originating from Derbyshire, of all places, is a lesson for all those who put their eggs in one basket – take note Coterie of Ministers. The problem is that if you rely on one particular strain it makes it susceptible to disease – which is exactly what is happening right now to the Cavendish.

Plantations the world over are under threat of being wiped out from a fungus, given the somewhat curious s name of Tropical Race 4 – a very nasty pestilence with the ability to establish itself extremely quickly and to remain in the soil for decades after. It has already wiped out crops in the Far East and Australia and is threatening the world’s banana production hub of South and Central America.

Such devastation would not only deprive us of our staple fruit, it has the potential to decimate the economies of producing countries. This is why the banana industry is busily trying to find a remedy so its vast production process can be saved, even if that means ditching the Cavendish in favour of another equally exploitable type.

No doubt this pressing task is in the hands of scientists in some secure laboratory diverting them from the other life-changing tasks that make headlines in the scare-mongering tabloids. So far the plight of the hapless Cavendish banana has gone under the radar of those newspapers which by August tend to be concentrating on the weather forecast for deep winter, looking for signs of impending flu pandemics or advising us which foods to – or not to – eat because they could cause, or prevent, all sorts of diseases.

Then lo and behold along comes the first synthetic beefburger to be hailed as the best way forward to feed an ever-growing world. Anyone who has ever eaten in any popular burger chain will attest to the bleeding obvious that synthetic meat has been around for years.

At £250,000 for a 5oz burger – sponsored by Google co-founder Sergey Brin – it is a tad on the expensive side. Made from 20,000 strands of meat grown in a laboratory from cow’s stem cells somewhere in Holland, it sounds as appetising as vegetarian bacon.

To digress for a moment, why do vegetarians want meatless bacon, sausages or burgers? I thought their raison d’être was to eschew meat so why do they crave alternatives of the real thing?

Back on track, the taste jury is out on the Frankenburger but like all potential saviours of the human race, it has got people talking.

Those scientists who so keep us entertained with the results of their esoteric research hope in the future that synthetic meat will take over from the real thing, thereby saving the environment from all the gases emitted by grazing livestock and freeing the aforementioned beasts from the suffering caused by the industrialised food chain.

Hang on a mo; let’s get one thing straight. A king’s ransom is not being spent on this research out of any true altruistic gesture to save the world from starvation.

It is just another cynical ploy by the mighty conglomerates that seek to further the industrialisation of the food chain for no other reason than to make money.

They have about as much sensitivity to the poor of world as Marie Antoinette showed to the starving peasants in pre-revolution France.