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Originally Posted by meizzwang
It's surprising how important bananas are to humanity, yet we have done relatively little to preserve many of these cultivars. Hundreds of organizations in the US (and probably thousands worldwide) are focused on saving rare and endangered animals with great success, but plants have generally been placed on the back burner... We've literally only had one single major successful organization, FHIA, work on improving bananas.
Thank you Gabe for taking action and doing the heavy lifting for us! Preserving the landrace variants is the first step to long term preservation of bananas. Hopefully one day we'll see these otherwise unknown varieties become easily available to farmers and especially home growers throughout the world  Genetic diversity is key to long term survival.... |
I agree with you that preserving genetic diversity is important and breeding bananas is relatively difficult (compared to something like maize or tomatoes), but FHIA is far from the only organization that has been breeding bananas, and in recent years, they are one of the most secretive with what they are doing. Here is a nice article summarizing the history and main contributors to banana breeding.
Who's breeding bananas? : Under the peel | News, knowledge and information on bananas
Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants
Many PNG AA types taste very similar to plantains, were you able to taste some of the unclassified AA types.
Amazing pics, thanks for sharing.
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I tasted many of them and more not pictured, some cooked, some raw, some both. The tastes and eating quality attributes are all over the board and as variable as the plants themselves. Some are indeed very Plantain-like, but they are so variable you can't really say anything collective about them all.