Why Are Bananas All the Same?

Step 1 of 5

Wild bananas are full of seeds.

A wild banana is mostly hard black seeds with a little flesh between them. It is barely worth eating, and the seeds are how the plant makes more of itself.

Step 2 of 5

The edible ones are a mistake that stuck.

A rare plant ended up with an extra set of chromosomes, which left it unable to make seeds. That failure is exactly what made it good to eat.

Step 3 of 5

So every plant is a cutting.

With no seeds, the only way to make more is to take a shoot from an existing plant. Every banana of a variety is a piece of one original plant, still growing.

Step 4 of 5

Identical means uniform, which is why they are cheap.

Every plant ripens at the same time, to the same size, with the same taste. That is what makes shipping bananas across the world at low cost possible at all.

Step 5 of 5

And identical means one disease can take them all.

If a fungus can kill one plant it can kill every plant. That has already happened once: the variety sold before the 1950s was wiped out and replaced.

A banana plant is not a tree. It has no wood at all — the trunk is tightly rolled leaf bases, which is why one storm can flatten a plantation.