Name: The most interesting fruit in the world could go extinct
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T16:36:54.000Z
Duration: 9 min 20 s
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This banana is known as the Gros Michel, AKA Big Mike, and it nearly went extinct.

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Hard to imagine because the myth that bananas are ubiquitous is so ingrained in our minds.

I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say bananas in pajamas.

Mauricio, Catalan's comedian, is composed of a single banana.

It is the number one grown fruit in the world.

The most consumed fruit, the most important fruit crop.

It's the, I think, the weirdness of bananas that makes them so interesting.

When Big Mike disappeared from the market, it was replaced with something very similar, the Cavendish banana.

And you probably recognize it as the banana since it's pretty much the only banana we see in the US.

By the 1950s, Cavendish became the most commercially successful banana.

Bananas are so good for you and so easy to digest.

But a variant of the same disease that virtually wiped out Big Mike and is coming for the Cavendish.

So what needs to happen to save our beloved banana?

They're part of the genus Musa and are full of potassium and an energy dense food, making them a staple crop in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

They originally came from Asia, likely somewhere in Southeast Asia.

So a wild bananas are going to be about the length of your thumb here.

And these banana seeds are rock hard, tooth shattering.

To get to the seedless bananas we have today, humans basically had to find sterile fruits.

It was probably a mutation that did this.

Some of these early farmers found a banana that was seedless and watched it propagate and said, hey, you know, we can cut this, this sucker off this daughter plant and take it somewhere else and the daughter plant gives birth to another plant and this can go on for thousands of years.

This method reproducing through propagations is also known as asexual cloning.

But it also creates some problems because these fruits are essentially now clones and they're all exactly the same and they carry the same weaknesses.

And this genetic cloning is really where the danger starts.

Commercially farmed bananas, which are pretty much all of the bananas we consume are monocrops.

It's an industrial agriculture term that refers to single crop species grown on the same land again and again.

It's driven by our demand for uniform, durable and cheap fruit.

The variety they picked was banana called the Gros Michel.

The Gros Michel is a great banana for commercial use because it's tough, it doesn't need to be packaged really that much.

The result, uniform bananas for consumers like us, but

extremely fragile biological conditions for the plants and the farmers.

You run a risk, which is that if one of your bananas gets sick, all of them are going to get sick.

And that was exactly what happened with Panama disease, or Tropical Race 1.

In the early 1900s, the plantations begin to get very sick.

Fungus invades the soil, making it impossible to grow the bananas.

But instead of diversifying, industrial banana companies acquired more lands as the plantations became diseased.

And all goes well until they finally run out of land.

This is partially how the term banana republic came to be.

It's an ugly history that involves US corporations like the United Fruit Company exploiting land and labor in Central America.

These companies took over farms and governments to grow exports like bananas cheaply and at a massive scale.

But no amount of land and conquest could stop the spread of Panama disease.

By the 1950s, TR1 had devastated the Gros Michel globally, virtually wiping it out of production.

Luckily, the Gros Michel had a close cousin that was resistant to that strain of Panama disease.

At the brink of extinction, at the brink of disaster, the banana industry saves itself, when in fact, it is only delayed, an inevitable fate that will come back to haunt it again.

Speaking of delicious bananas, this video is presented by delicious yogurt.

For over 40 years, Stonyfield Organic has been a champion of truth in our food system.

There is so much misinformation out there, which is why they believe in using the highest quality ingredients to ensure that what they put on the shelves is the best product for you and your family.

The milk they use comes from all over the country, including Molly Brook Farms in Vermont.

It's USDA organic certified, which means no growth hormones, no pesticides, no antibiotics.

So the next time you're in your grocery run and you're thinking about bananas, make sure to also check out Stony Field Organic Yogurt.

It's also important to note that Stonyfield Organic did not dictate the content of this video, but

their support did make this tasty reporting possible.

By the 1990s, the Cavendish was facing a new strain of the Panama disease, Tropical Race 4, or TR4.

The banana companies refuse to believe it, and they just keep doing what they're doing.

The disease started in Taiwan in the late 80s.

From there, it spread to Africa, Australia and the Americas.

By late 2025, TR4 is reported in Ecuador, the largest banana exporter in the world.

If I am wearing a sneaker, with one bit of contaminated soil, and

I walk through a banana plantation, I'm going to spread that disease.

But unlike what happened with Gros Michel in the 1950s, there is no banana cousin to replace the Cavendish with.

So we're in the situation now where this disease is really starting to have a dramatic influence.

And all of the major producers around the world are now recognizing at long last things have to change.

Now, it's not like other bananas don't exist.

There are actually over 1,000 species of bananas with specialty farms and supermarkets.

You can even find some of these other varieties.

There's certainly been a move to try to move consumer preferences from Cavendish to something else consumers didn't like.

That preference is such an incredible driver.

And to try to get consumers to change from a Cavendish banana to something else is going to be a big ask.

My group started to genetically modify bananas.

So we know there is resistance to Panama disease, tropical race fall.

It actually occurs in one of those wild bananas we were talking about, the ones with seeds.

We pulled one gene out of that banana and transferred it to Cavendish.

But as you can imagine, consumers have a lot of skepticism around genetically modified foods.

At this time in March 2026, Professor Dale's lab grown Cavendish bananas are not yet available in stores.

We've now had approval to grow, commercially grow that banana in Australia, but

Genetically modified crops are highly regulated.

So Europe at the moment is very reticent on taking any genetically modified foods.

And the other thing, of course, is consumer perception.

While his modified banana will likely never make it into the European market, Professor Dale has other solutions, like gene editing.

In many countries, this is no longer considered genetic modification.

There are many, many other crops that are being gene edited, and

So to save our beloved banana, either Western consumers will have to give up on the myth of there being only one type of banana, or regulators are going to have to accept genetically engineered Cavendish.

I think we're going to have to have an open mind about how we're going to produce our crops under what are becoming increasingly extreme conditions.

Though truthfully, science can only do so much.

The answers for preserving our beloved banana and the future of many of our fruits lies in maintaining a diverse ecosystem.

And the answer is destroy the monoculture.

We need to get all those bananas that are so good to the United States, to Europe, to the Western world, because that's the only way to sort of protect the banana and to protect people who grow bananas.