Bananas: A low-carbon food?

By some measures, yes

By Culinate staff

August 5, 2010

In the department of unconventional stances, the Guardian recently ran a short piece arguing in favor of the banana as a low-carbon food. How so? No hothouses required, a long shelf life, and efficient cargo-ship transportation to market. Heck, the fruit even comes with its own biological packaging. But of course, there’s always a catch — or several:

None of which is to say that bananas are too good to be true. Of the hundreds of banana varieties in existence, almost all the ones we get to eat are of the Cavendish variety. The adoption of this monoculture in the pursuit of maximum, cheapest yields has been criticised for degrading land and requiring liberal use of pesticides and fungicides — sometimes at the expense of plantation workers. Furthermore, although land is dramatically better used for bananas than, say, beef in terms of nutrition per hectare, there are still parts of the world in which forests are being cleared for banana plantations.