Hacker Remix

Gene-edited non-browning banana could cut food waste

65 points by geox 1 day ago | 68 comments

DonaldFisk 21 hours ago

> We’re eating today the same bananas as our grandparents were eating in the 1950s.

No, we're not. Back in the 1950s our grandparents were eating Gros Michel bananas. Now, we're eating (by all accounts) inferior Cavendish bananas.

https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/history-of-the-gros-m...

hinkley 16 hours ago

But the reasons we are eating these two bananas is that their skin colors align with the ripeness of the fruit in a way that the human brain thinks makes sense. And because we are monocropping, the same family of fungi are now successfully attacking the Cavendish that took out the Gros Michel.

All the other species of bananas tend to turn brown almost immediately after or around the time they are fully ripe, and that makes them less commercially viable.

So I would say that these gene splices are less interesting for the Cavendish directly and more interesting for bringing genetic diversity into the produce isle. We could have five kinds of banana like we have five kinds of pears. Which indirectly helps the Cavendish by slowing down the doom clock on banana plantations.

lo_zamoyski 14 hours ago

> in a way that the human brain thinks makes sense.

Side note: Let us avoid pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical language like this bit. It is suggestive of the homunculus fallacy, it misconstrues the nature of perception, and ignores the role of habit and cultural influences. It's also artificial, stylistically stodgy, and comes off as pretentious in a gauche, pop sci kind of way.

hinkley 14 hours ago

You can have all the idealism you want in a place where farmers aren't bankrupted by not supplying what the market demands.

The market demands bananas that are not brown when they are ripe.

pseudosaid 12 hours ago

okay semantic santa thank you for gifting us this trite side note. the message was clear and makes sense and youre disregarding that to elevate your preferred modus of communication. do you eat the chaff with your wheat?

its almost as if the roles of habit and cultur influence the way that a human brain makes sense of its stimulus.

dostick 1 hour ago

Exactly, who doesn’t know this fact, which is one of first things you learn about selection in consumed plants. And especially Guardian journalist specialising in this topic.

owlstuffing 23 hours ago

Most banana varieties actually taste best and last longer as they start to brown (ripen).

The Cavendish—the dominant grocery store banana—is one of the few that turns mushy and unpleasant when it does.

throw-qqqqq 22 hours ago

I prefer the cavendish a little green and unripe, but not so green it leaves my mouth dry from the tannins.

When slightly green, it has a more veggie-like taste and not the super sweet and pungent banana smell/taste. I don’t like them when yellow/browning.

Horses for courses I guess :)

ofalkaed 14 hours ago

>is one of the few that turns mushy and unpleasant when it does.

Unpleasant for eating as a banana but quite pleasant for baking. I always buy more banana's than I can possibly eat before they get overripe, eat them raw until they get mushy then make banana bread with the remainder.

partiallypro 22 hours ago

I think the Cavendish is better when slightly browned too, it's much sweater. Basically, not edible to me when it's just yellow. There is just a certain point when it stops being good.

contingencies 19 hours ago

Benefits of green: Lower sugar, higher in 5-HTP (potential mood enhancer, sleep enhancer, anti-anxiety). https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-794/5-htp

Benefits of brown: Sweeter, softer, better for making banana bread :) https://www.womensweeklyfood.com.au/recipe/baking/banana-bre...

maury91 24 hours ago

I have noticed that putting bananas in the fridge has a weird effect, the peel turns black like if it's outside, but the inside of the banana stays yellow and hard. It is very weird to peel a full black banana and find the inside normal without any browning

hinkley 16 hours ago

Wild assed guess: the cold slows down the chemical reactions in the flesh of the banana but cannot save the skin. Putting bananas in a bag makes them ripen faster, and a fridge is just a larger enclosed space.

hhhAndrew 12 hours ago

This! I used to think fridging bananas ruined them right away as they went brown, until I learned the insides are perfectly fine.

wakawaka28 11 hours ago

Bananas emit a gas that causes them to ripen faster. The same gas can also cause other fruits in the same space to ripen. It's weird but kinda useful. There are products out there claiming to absorb this gas, to keep everything fresh for longer.

morkalork 23 hours ago

I see this all the time with bananas that go from green to brown without turning yellow, I always heard people blame the bananas getting too cold during shipping.

hinkley 16 hours ago

I lost it when I moved but we used to have a chart on the fridge that said which fruits you should or should not store together because they make each other ripen faster.

noduerme 15 hours ago

Bananas speed up avocado ripening, I know that.

hinkley 14 hours ago

Anyone who has stuffed a banana into a pack or bag knows that bananas also speed up banana ripening. If you're going on an all-day hike, take the almost-ripe banana.

staticautomatic 14 hours ago

Whenever I see this happen, I like to say the bananas are sublimating.

vacuity 1 day ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Food waste will not be addressed properly without cultural shifts. Granted, certain technological improvements may prompt them, but that's a bit backwards of a problem solving method.

marky1991 22 hours ago

From the wikipedia article: "As an example of where the paradox did not occur, large improvements in farming productivity (including the Third Agricultural Revolution) led to lower food prices but did not result in increased demand for food. (Demand for food is inelastic.) This instead led to lower employment in the farming sector, which declined from 40% of Americans in 1900 to less than 2% in 2024.[14]"

But generally, I don't see the relevance. Jevon's paradox is about lowered costs driving further demand; how does a non-browning banana lower the cost of bananas?

vacuity 22 hours ago

Thank you for pointing out that food demand is inelastic, that does shift my perspective somewhat. A complication about demand for food is that American culture promotes luxury and overindulgence. Still not elastic, but more food waste than is "normal". In general, buying more food should cause more food waste.

> But generally, I don't see the relevance. Jevon's paradox is about lowered costs driving further demand; how does a non-browning banana lower the cost of bananas?

I think cost is not as relevant here, moreso that people will buy more bananas, as they will brown less quickly, but will often overshoot.

TulliusCicero 15 hours ago

Overall food demand is inelastic, people can only eat so much. But specific foods can absolutely be elastic, different types of food kind of come in and out of vogue (avocado usage in the US is massively up over the last few decades).

neoecos 21 hours ago

I'm guessing the impact on this from the GLP drugs. I remember a post last week about the impact on the economy of the growing usage of this appetite suppression drugs.

cjbgkagh 1 day ago

I wonder if things like tipping culture will encourage people to eat at home and be more mindful about their consumption. I hate being extorted for 25% tips and then told if I can’t afford the 25% then I shouldn’t be eating out.

Kind of how the hatred of dealing with printer companies and their extortionist ink prices accelerated the shift to paperless.

So maybe we’ll get to a better state, perhaps not through the means we expected.

rwyinuse 24 hours ago

I bet current US government's economic policies will be even more effective at reducing food waste. Food waste will be radically reduced when the prices skyrocket, and the masses can barely afford their groceries, let alone eating out. Tariffs combined with deportations of agricultural labor will likely lead to that outcome.

batch12 23 hours ago

I used to wait tables. With that said, I also don't like that wait staff costs are hidden from the menu price of a meal. It also seems very rich person cosplay to decide how much I should pay my servant wench after a meal. Even more irritating is the request to tip now for almost any food purchase and to-go order at the register. One doesn't even know where that tip goes. The food prep person? Cook? Expo? Split? To the restaurant? Who knows?

hx8 23 hours ago

I'm not sure that eating out solves the food waste problem. I'll agree that in theory centralizing food preparation could lead to increased efficiency, but in practice eating out is most often either a luxury or convince experience and emphasizes those two things much more than cost or efficiency. Maybe one day automation can reduce labor costs allowing restaurants to sell cheaper food, but no one has seemed to figure out that problem yet.

In addition to price (which is a function of efficiency), I wouldn't shift any more of my eating behavior to out of the house until the following problems are solved.

* Portion sizes. I usually eat 600-800 calories in a sitting at home. This portion size is considered a light meal in restaurants, and generally has less appealing options and ordering it sends weird social signals.

* Healthier food. Most restaurants use more oils and salt than my preference. The vegetables and fruit are usually less fresh than even Walmart/Kroger offers.

* Time investment. I can cook and clean maybe 25 different dishes in less than 20 minutes of focused work at home. Much more if you count semi-prepared foods that come frozen or in boxes. The only thing that competes with time investment is hot food delivery, which comes at about a 8x price premium compared to cooking.

AJ007 21 hours ago

Another problem is you have no transparency with what ingredients restaurants are really using. Even if you know today, with certainty, you can't be sure tomorrow. Usually small chains will start out very high on the quality scale for suppliers and ingredients, and then swap them out as they scale/suddenly need to not lose money.

Food is tricky because once you have food processed or prepared, and you don't have the raw ingredients, you really have no fucking clue what you are ingesting. Most people act, and assume that they do.

pipe2devnull 24 hours ago

25%? That’s so high. Most places in the USA I feel like 18-20% is the norm

cjbgkagh 21 hours ago

I don't remember where, I think the reason 25% sticks in my mind is because I usually do 20% and tend not to think about it. I did stop going to restaurants because of it but I would still go to fast food / take outs and then they started requesting tips before they even made the food. The increased in cost on top of the tip felt like small scale extortion - what are you going to do to the food if I don't pay. So now I just cook at home and save a bunch of money and I wonder how many others are doing the same.

marky1991 22 hours ago

I was always taught that 15% is the standard and that's all I give.

dehrmann 22 hours ago

It was in 1995. We briefly flirted with 18%, but it's 20% now. At least for restaurants, taxis, and barbers. I've been prompted for tips at self checkout kiosks and tip a generous 0%.

eigenspace 23 hours ago

18-20% is already completely insane.

scns 19 hours ago

10% is the norm here.

thih9 23 hours ago

> Increasing the yield of a crop, such as wheat, for a given area will reduce the area required to achieve the same total yield. However, increasing efficiency may make it more profitable to grow wheat and lead farmers to convert land to the production of wheat, thereby increasing land use instead.

Off topic, if we apply this to AI, in theory we could work less, with AI making us more efficient and allowing us to achieve the same results. But because we are humans, we are going to value our work less, and ask ourselves to work more.

karmakaze 23 hours ago

The price of bananas are artificially low anyway, so increasing delivery efficiency will make the same prices less artificial.