Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
bbc.com174 points by teleforce a day ago
174 points by teleforce a day ago
Seems like an opportunity to plug the latest video by my favorite YouTube long form documentary maker, OTR:
The History of the Banana
https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom
Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea.
If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
If you like this long format style of video, you might enjoy Asianometry, "video essays on business, economics, and history." [0] Here is a video on the banana also, "The Wildly Infectious Banana Plague." [1]
Asianometry is one of the rare gems among youtube channels, along with Alexander the ok [0] and Technology Connections [1]
I'll second this. I'm continually impressed with the breadth of coverage from Asianometry. Great channel.
Didn't expect to see this on HN, but it's definitely one of my favorite YouTube channels. Most food history content online feels like straight up readings from Wikipedia, but OTR does actual research and interviews. The Golden Triangle episode where they interviewed the anti-CCP rebel veteran who was like 90 years old was pretty neat. Doesn't sound like it'd tie into food, but it does.
My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe
Potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins/zucchinis/most squashes, cassava, the common bean (including pinto, black, kidney, etc), cassava, sunflowers, avocado, etc all didn't exist in European kitchens until the 1500s (and not really widespread until at least the 1600s).
Also, most of these crops were specifically domesticated in the Andes. If you go to the Andes today you can still find traditional potato farmers who take care of hundreds of varieties of potatoes of all different shapes and colors. Some are ornamental, some are edible raw, some are only used in soup, some are even used medicinally
Maybe surprising is that there are no native species of banana to "the New World" despite there being about 100 species and thousands of named cultivars.
Coffee is another interesting example in the other direction, it's so often associated with places like Colombia, Java, etc that people don't realize it's only native to Ethiopia, and that the majority of coffee consumed around the world today descends from one specific genetic lineage that was cultivated for a few centuries in Yemen.
Erstwhile seafaring powers went to war over trade routes for these. Surprising it isn't that well known.
Most of that I knew, but I was surprised at the beans. I thought beans were a standard medieval fare.
It turned out that these were fava beans, which stem from the Old World.
Have you read Charles C. Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"? It's all about the global impact of the opening of the New World by the Europeans, and how the global exchange created and is creating the "homogenocene", the age of homogeneity. There's a part about a folk song in the Philippines that lovingly goes over the crops being grown around a village. They're all introduced.
It really transformed Europe too. Europe's basically a story of famine after famine until they got access to the potato. I don't know if any other technology has saved as many European lives as the potato
Pacific island cultures are a bit unique in their relationship to the New World though. Chickens which come from SE Asian jungles have been in South America since at least 1300 AD. And sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia around 1000 AD.
1300 AD?! Did the Polynesians bring chickens with them? I knew about the sweet potatoes, but the chickens are a whole different manner.
Chickens descend from jungle fowl, which were carried out into the Pacific from SE Asia.
Yes exactly. We have chicken remains in Chile that are dated between 1304 and 1424. And we even have DNA confirmation from those bones that link them to modern Polynesian chicken populations. The tailless, blue-egged Araucana breed is still around today and is thought to predate Columbus
Ask a 5yr old. They've watched Moana a dozen times and can name a chicken character.
His other book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus"¹ is also excellent.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
When my Korean friends tell me that my cuisine isn't spicy enough: Well... let's talk about that spice.
Sugarcane is also thought to be originally from New Guinea, although it spread widely in prehistory.
> He pointed out that Musa Basjoos are not really for eating.
> He said: "It's basically like having a mouth full of ball bearings with half a teaspoon of banana on them."
Maybe we can iterate on the texture some more here.
Here is a photo of the seeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana...
Is the flesh soft and sweet like a modern cultivated banana? I wonder how different it is to eat one of those compared to something like a tamarind, which is also mostly seeds, covered in a relatively small amount of edible delicious stuff.
Prior to human intervention, 'bananas' were small with tons of seeds.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly threatened by parasites like the Panama Disease, because if one plant is vulnerable, they all are.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it.
I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western grocery stores are 1 variety, Cavendish, that have been endlessly cloned from cuttings. They weren't the first seedless variety commercially available, they were preceded by Gros Michel. But either way, travel to southeast Asia and you'll find a lot more varieties on sale.
Interestingly, apparently the Gros Michel banana (which you can still get, if you try hard enough) tastes much more like artificial banana flavor, because that was the dominant variety when the flavor was developed.
Its simply a cost thing as the majority of gros michel bannana plants in areas with the fungus will die every few years as infection takes that long, and most areas gained the fungus during the peak of gros miachel cultivation. But at a small scale you can avoid the fungus or just plant new plants when the fungus takes hold, its just more expensive and limited in scale.
It just has more isoamyl acetate, which is what artificial banana flavoring uses.
I keep on hearing this fact but I haven't tasted Gros Michel so I don't know. Fact or factoid who knows
Where does this nonsensical urban legend come from? Any South Asian market has various genomes that do not descend from that. It has to be the most widely-spread confidently-incorrect claim.
Naval oranges are all clones from a single mutant tree too
Similarly, all apple varieties are propagated like this.
Apple cultivars are not genetic. If you plant seeds, you're going to get some random apples, which probably aren't very good. The cultivars are all produced via cuttings.
This reminds me of the stone carvings found in Scotland showing grape vines growing there.
In other words, it used to be MUCH warmer in the northern latitudes.
The UK straddles the 55th parallel North. Due to the jet streams (and formerly, trade winds) carrying warm air from the Caribbean, it has often benefitted from a milder climate than other regions at similar latitudes: Alaska, Siberia, the Baltic states.
But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna.
When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember.
And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas.
It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.
People/companies are already testing avocado, banana, and coffee plantations in Italy at scale. Climate change really is insane.
Just wait till the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation halts, then you can grow icicles!
Last year ours bloomed, too. The problem is that it happens to late in the year and I can’t wrap that 5m high “tree” to protect from the cold. So the bananas were the size of your pinky. Next problem, once they bloom, they die. So yes, climate change is real. For comparison, we are located in south Germany near Stuttgart and we also have a fig tree and an olive tree in our garden.
Are figs rare in central europe climates?
I live in Hungary and they seem to be relatively widespread, if not as much as in southern Europe.
The climate in Hungary is really not quite the same as in Stuttgart...
We have had figs in southern Germany for decades. Not all varieties grow well here of course but just having figs growing doesn't really tell you much.
I have a paw paw tree that has survived 7 years in northern Wisconsin. Unfortunately it is the only one out of five that I planted that has survived and so I'll never get fruit because they reproduce sexually and as far as I know the closest one is 4 hours south in Madison.
Pawpaws are actually hermaphroditic not dioecious. Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination. However, you can save some male pollen until next year.
Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower
Wait would that work? My understanding was that the pollen had to come from a different genome of pawpaw for it to work... But perhaps I'm mistaken?
Hmm I guess you're right. Most cultivars seem to be self-incompatible. Like most self-incompatible plants though, it's not 100%. Some cultivars like "Sunflower" don't seem to mind at all
> Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination
How does this work in practice? Do other trees from the same species produce male flowers first, and then female? Logically, if all trees produce female flowers in spring and male flowers in the summer then the species can only survive if the seeds can remain viable unfertilized for months (which is probably not that exceptional for plants, I wouldn't know). But if the female seeds are still viable by the time the plant sprouts its male flowers, exactly how does this prevent self-pollination?
Actually I just looked it up and they're more bizarre than I thought. They are actually "protogynous". Meaning all flowers start off as female and as they mature they turn male.
I should've just said "later" instead of "later in the year"
I'm not sure how long pollen stays viable in the environment. Some species can stay viable for many weeks but most are just a few days I think. They can stay viable for years if refrigerated properly however.
Graft a steam with a different variety and then you will need a lot of flies, or a brush and some artistic strokes in May.
In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
I grow a plantain orchard in South America and while i need to take double care of such spiders, they are not aggressive at all. I find them super cute and let visit my home as well. :)
We grow bananas at our farm in India and we have never seen this spider ever.
Brazilian wandering spiders are rarely found outside of northern South America.
Reminds me of Cecropia trees which are adapted to use some ant species as self defense. The trees live 20-30 years (the same length as an ant queen) and exudes a protein rich substance to feed the ants called Müllerian bodies. The ants in return aggressively protect the tree.
Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider. It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us.
There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge to grab a banana.
The spider is easily identified because it has four identical small frontal eyes arranged as a perfect square. Is big, bold and it warns before to attack [1] (most tarantulas are shy). And it jumps, of course. Can hide, once in a blue moon, in exported South American banana bunches (European breed bananas are spider free).
[1] If it raise the legs showing the yellow and black rings beneath is a clear warning saying "get lost right now, of I will land on your face"
It turns out that Phoneutria defensive bites are most often "dry" with little if any venom. It's thought that the spiders conserve venom for use on actual prey items.
BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.
First of all, thanks for your interesting contribution.
Is a good taxonomic character if you are in Europe, as no European spider, big or small, has this eyes.
Also this is a fast way to discard other tropical spiders that could also appear on orders of imported fresh fruit and have a fearsome look but are harmless.
Tarantulas have small eyes arranged like a bowtie. Huntsmans have four eyes in a line. If you are bitten by a spider that is hairy, bigger than 10cm, and does have eyes arranged like those, is just a pinch, painful but safer than a mosquito bite. Just wash it with soap. Same if the eyes are arranged in a square but two are much bigger than the other two. Safe.
Otherwise.
If you are bitten by a cream hairy spider that has only "3 eyes", one central and two laterals (really 6 in 3 pairs) is a Sicariidae, go to a doctor.
If it has four eyes of the same size arranged in a square be cautious. If it has a middle groove in the rear part of the torax is a Ctenidae, so may be dangerous. As Phoneutria is the most common Ctenidae found in banana bunches, and as we can't discard still that every other genus on the family aren't poisonous, play safe and go to an hospital. If is a harmless related species only they can identify it, and if not you are in the correct place. They can evaluate if is a dry bite and can stabilize you and provide treatment if is not.
The other spiders that are really concerning, the Australian Atrax and Mouse spiders and the black widows are much smaller, 1-5cm, not really hairy and glossy black with red or white marks. They are mostly terrestrial.
If you have not crushed yet the spider, you may need to take a good photo from some distance. Is easier if you trap it before on a glass jar, as long as you can do it safely. If in doubt assure to bring the dead spider with you, so the doctor can see it under a microscope.
Lot of excellent information. Thanks. I'm glad someone out there doesn't have arachnophobia. I'm also glad it's not me.
> opened the fridge to grab a banana.
A chef should know better than to keep bananas in a fridge!
The ones I know are completely brown.
They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you.
I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.
Wandering spiders do not feed on banana sap. They hunt small invertebrates on the forest floor at night and hide among bananas, or other dark and protected locations during the day. The defensive posture you described is one way to help identify them.
With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
The population of London isn't much more today than it was in 1930. And the population density is more or less the same too. I think it's unlikely that people's bodies are the cause of heating. Greater London for example would receive about 1572 MW of solar irradiance on a sunny day.
The city burns quite a bit of fossil fuel for heating and transportation every day though. That certainly has effects on microclimates (think vents from the tube, which is getting ever hotter).
This is the first time I've seen someone blame immigration for climate change.
Because you never looked. What he's saying is a true and well known problem in climatology. Population increases create an appearance of warming in the dataset.
There are two sources of corruption.
The first is the urban heat island effect. Many weather stations are corrupted because although they were once in fields or other natural sites, over time cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing population and ended up building around the stations. This distorts readings by pushing up the min on the min/max thermometers, as tarmac absorbs heat during the day and re-radiates it at night. If you compute the average temperature for a day by just taking the midpoint between the min and max this makes it appear that the site is warming even if the max doesn't change i.e. there is no actual climate warming.
The second is that a large number of weather stations sit next to runways. It's intentional: pilots need to know runway temperature for takeoff calculations. But climatologists obviously shouldn't use them because not only are they next to tarmac, they're also being blasted with jet exhaust. So as population increases due to immigration (as western countries have below replacement fertility), jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations.
In some countries this is a serious problem. For example, the UK is very built up with unusually high population density. The World Meteorological Organization has a classification system for weather stations in which class 1 is the best (lowest uncertainty) and class 4/5 are the worst (uncertainty of 2/5 degrees respectively, which is higher than the 1.5 degrees of warming claimed to have happened since 1850). Unfortunately nearly 90% of all British weather stations are class 4 or class 5, but the Met Office still use them to make claims about record breaking temperatures.
Climatologists have techniques they say correct for these problems, but the algorithms don't actually work. US GHCN uses something called homogenization, a kind of interpolation which spreads warmth from cities and runways into colder rural areas, creating an appearance of global warming across the entire dataset that's not there in the thermometer readings from uncorrupted sites.
Yes, I'm sure the reason the UK had its hottest mean June temperature ever and recorded its highest ever June temperature in the village of Lingwood, Norfolk is all down to how many weather stations are located next to runways.
That's the reason the banana trees are growing, too. They read the temperature measurements from next to the airport runways.
Some time ago an FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the UK Met Office got the following response:
Background: Class 1–2 are regarded as excellent or very good exposures, Class 3 permits uncertainties up to about 1 °C, Class 4 permits uncertainties up to about 2 °C, and Class 5 permits uncertainties up to about 5 °C because of nearby artificial heat sources or other exposure problems.
According to analyses of the released data, approximately:
22% of stations were Classes 1–3, about 49% were Class 4, about 29% were Class 5.
I guess there must be very good reasons for not ensuring that the majority of stations are Class 1-3.
What's involved in ensuring a weather station meets class 1 requirements?
It's a theoretical optimum location for measuring whether temperature at a weather station is likely to be representative of average temperature across the surrounding area, with requirements for flatness of land, vegetation of the appropriate type and height, no shade between sunrise and sunset, no windbreaks and distance from reflective surfaces.
Has nothing to do with its suitability for use in longitudinal study, because whilst a site next to a massive concrete windbreak might be a degree or two hotter than other locations in a region, unless the concrete windbreak is a recent phenomenon, it can't be the cause of temperatures at that site being higher in the 2020s than they were in the 2000s or 1970s...
The Lingwood site is class 5 because it's in some guy's garden and surrounded by trees/hedges that block airflow. Class 5 sites have +/- 5 degrees of uncertainty and shouldn't be used for climatology under any circumstances.
As to the runway point you're being sarcastic about - yes, that can happen. The UK set a record temperature in July 2022, which the BBC reports was set at Coningsby in Lincolnshire:
https://www.bbc.com/weather/articles/crm04vm30x9o
In fact it was set at RAF Coningsby at the exact moment two Typhoon fighter jets landed, and lasted only for a minute or two i.e. it was recording jet exhaust from the landing.
This fact had to be dug up through FOIA requests, it wasn't advertised by the Met Office or British media anywhere. Brits were led to believe this had occurred in some open field near a village somewhere.
Every time you read about a record breaking temperature in Britain, you aren't being told about the atrocious state of the weather station network there. Almost all the records are being set at weather stations that can't measure change in the climate due to urban corruption or being sited at runways.
OK, got you. Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway or in heat islands (which we definitely haven't had for decades) or in someone's garden, whereas all the historical benchmarks exceeded were flawless. The UK recording a temperature of over 40 celsius was actually an anomaly because of the first time a jet ever landed at a British airport.
Also the lack of rain was measurement error too.
It was clearly hot last month, but that isn't what anyone is arguing about in this thread. Hot months have happened throughout history. inigyou scoffed at the idea the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration. But they shouldn't have scoffed, because it's one of the primary drivers of data difficulties in climatology. Do you accept this fact?
Your argument for "the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration" is that an individual high temperature was recorded at an RAF base, ironically one of the places in the country you're least likely to find an immigrant. It was one of a number of places to record a temperature over 40 degrees, compared with the previous high point of 38.7 degrees (including all the airports and RAF bases and urban heat islands). Indeed even if we choose to believe Toby Young's tinfoil hat brigade's claims that it was definitely boosted by a jet engine and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out, it was still hotter than any previous day ever recorded anywhere in the UK before that supposed jet engine landing, and I'm pretty sure we've landed jets there in summer before.
Nobody honestly believes that the reason the UK is recording hotter temperatures all over the country is because immigration is driving Typhoons to land differently at RAF Coningsby
