sbsquarepants wrote: » Now first the disclaimer - this could well be an urban myth!! You know those little foam banana sweets - that taste delicious but not quite like a banana, they're distinctly bananaish however? Well the story I heard, is that is what bananas used to taste like before a fungal infection wiped out the variety everyone used to eat. When we switched over to a different variety they never updated the artificial flavour in the sweets, leaving them stuck in some sort of delicious banana time warp.
ohnonotgmail wrote: » There may be something to that. In the 1950s the dominant commercial variety of banana was wiped out by disease. It was replaced a variant that was immune. Even these variants are starting to show signs of the disease so the banana as we know it may go extinct.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
GBX wrote: » Was it naturally immune or was it developed to be immune? If the latter would this be the beginning of GMO type food?
Buford T. Justice V wrote: » All new varieties of food crop are developed to target a number of criteria. Yield, harvest time, flavour etc etc are huge factors in deciding which varieties are progressed beyond the breeding stage for commercial trials to see how they perform in the real world rather than in the lab/glasshouse. Probably chief among those traits is resistance to disease. It's a constant battle to find resistant genotypes growing in the wild and incorporate the relevant traits into commercial crops for use in growing our food. Just taking potatoes, blight is a constant threat to potatoes growing here due to our climatic conditions, specifically rain, which greatly favour the growth and dispersal of the disease around the country. There is a large number of groups in South America looking for new strains of potato in the wild, where potatoes are native, which show possibly desired traits and incorporating those traits into breeding programmes. Even if the trait can be incorporated into a commercial strain of the crop, other factors may come into play which prevent the crop being grown, such as low yields, irregular shapes, resistance to other diseases, ability to stay rot free in storage etc. And even then, the strains of blight mutate and slowly develop to overcome the bred resistance over time. Less than 1 in a million developed strains reach the end stage of large scale production and the same is true for all commercial crops, there is a very small chance of hitting the jackpot like the Rooster potato which is widely grown today. There are promising trials of GM potatoes which have a huge and seemingly more persistent resistance to blight, basically they cut some decades of breeding out to develop a strain which is extremely close to being commercially viable. It also has the added bonus of reducing fungicide by a factor of over 50%, just by the addition of wild genes to already commercial crops. The Cavendish was bred conventionally to provide resistance to the Fusarium strain that devastated the Gros Michel.
ohnonotgmail wrote: » was it bred to be immune or was it picked because it was immune?
Cavendish bananas entered mass commercial production in 1903 but did not gain prominence until later when Panama disease attacked the dominant Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety in the 1950s. Because they were successfully grown in the same soils as previously affected Gros Michel plants, many assumed the Cavendish cultivars were more resistant to Panama disease
secondrowgal wrote: » In relation to potatoes, we have a fruit and veg shop since the early 80s. Growing up, I always remember (British) Queens, Records and Kerrs Pink potatoes. Like many, I had to emigrate in the early 90s and didn't come back until the 00s. The family shop is still going (buy local folks!!!). Suddenly (to me it was sudden), there was this Rooster potato. Where the hell did that come from? Turns out it was developed in Teagasc and launched in the 90s. It now accounts for over 70% of potatoes sold in Ireland due to its versatility (although our discerning customers are still partial to a good Record).
loyatemu wrote: » Roosters are both versatile and reliable (from a cooking point of view, I assume they're also reliable and fairly disease resistant to grow). The recent CSO report showed that we import 72000 tonnes of spuds a yearhttps://cso.ie/en/interactivezone/visualisationtools/infographics/economy/#economy-pg-3 Anecdotally a lot of these are for chippers who prefer the Maris Piper variety (also an excellent spud). I don't know if anyone can confirm this?
wildlifeboy wrote: » The popular table-top football game known as 'Subbuteo' got its name from the scientific name of the Hobby, Falco subbuteo, because it was the designer's favourite bird.
sbsquarepants wrote: » The question is what do they now weigh? Answer is they now weigh 50KG. The "paradox" really just shows how badly we tend to handle ratios mentally.
sbsquarepants wrote: » All this talk of wet and dry spuds has reminded of a thing called the potato paradox (it's not really a paradox, but it adds to it's allure to call it one!) It goes something like this - You buy a bag of spuds, it weighs 100kg. They are mostly water, as spuds tend to be, in fact these particular spuds are 99% water. Being the gormless spud muncher you are, you forget to tie the bag properly and they lose some moisture, it's not the end of the world though they're still 98% water. The question is what do they now weigh? Answer is they now weigh 50KG. The "paradox" really just shows how badly we tend to handle ratios mentally.
cdeb wrote: » Reminds me of one of my favourite jokes - How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None...
cdeb wrote: » All this potato talk reminds me of one of my favourite jokes - How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None...
Ipso wrote: » You should be shot into space!! In spudnik.
cdeb wrote: » Love it! Back on topic though - spuds were poisonous originally; they're in the same biological family as nightshade plants. They were turned into a superfood by generations of farmers engaged on one of the world's first genetic engineering projects, who had to breed 95% of the poison out of them. No-one knows who, why or, most bafflingly, how they did it. Chris McCandless - the American who went to live in the Alaska wilderness, a story turned into a book and a film called Into The Wild possibly suffered potato poisoning, which made him too weak to trap food, and so he starved to death. He had gone into Alaska to be completely away from human civilisation, but died less than a mile from a rail line
Chancer3001 wrote: » The boxing crab holds two stinging sea anemones in its claws and uses them as stinging boxing gloves for defence.
Chancer3001 wrote: » Somebody please explain that potato thing to me. 99% water and 1%solid =100kg But surely we don't know where the weight is stored? Like the 1% solid is 1kg? Or 10kg of it? And if 98% water and 2% solid... wouldn't it stay the same if the solid weighed 1kg? I'm lost where 50 comes from. Unless the solid is weightless ? Or something...
server down wrote: » That’s the reason alright. And it works. Anybody who knows America knows that if an item has a sticker price of 2 dollars you don’t just hand over 2 dollars, not in most states anyway. The tax is calculated at the cashier. It’s not on the price tag. With a sales tax of 8.5% after rounding the cost is $2:17 for a sticker price of $2 or $1.99 I even doubt that Bryson wrote that as it wouldn’t make sense to Americans.
