"naturally mutant wild bananas"


Boing-Boing needs more posts with these words in them.

The GMO route is worth persuing, even if it results in toxic bananas that taste like borax and nutrasweet. Without a steady supply of bananas, there will be no fresh slippery banana peels , sealing the fate of much physical comedy.

One ray of hope comes from Honduran scientists, who peeled and sieved 400 tonnes of bananas to find 15 seeds for breeding. They have come up with a fungus-resistant variety which could be grown organically. If bananas don't disappear from supermarket shelves by 2013, they will look, and taste, different.

can you imagine peeling 400 metric tons (440 US tons) for FIFTEEN SEEDS!

Edited by author 01-16-2003 02:07 PM
I would have thought they had already fucked with banannas like they have with everything else. In reply to Ernie's post, "They have come up with a fungus resistant variety which could be grown organically." Do you mean to say that they've come up with a non-GMO anti-fungal bananna? Or that they've tampered with it to make it anti-fungal and they plan to pass it off as certified organic. Or did you mean just plain old organic as in "it grew out of the dirt" (and not a test tube)?!?

Edited by author 01-16-2003 03:00 PM
If you get actual viable seeds from the bananas, they can theoretically be grown out naturally without GM tinkering. They havent tampered with them yet, because they've never needed seeds - it's all been from clones. Now that they have seeds they may try to combine the DNA with another plant or animal in some Frankenprocess, but to say 'organic' at the end seems to imply no GM use. You *can* take GM seeds, put them in the dirt and grow them organically however, so....