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got this email from Wendell in Indiana who writes, the number of my growing up years were spent in a hill station in South India. The bus transporting us along the winding road would stop at a little town around 4,000 feet. We would revel in a kaleidoscope of fruit, including many varieties of bananas from tiny, extremely sweet ones to big, fat yellow ones with pink fruit, red ones, and so forth. One of the main things causing destruction of our planet are the monocultures of factory farms and industrial agriculture. Dan, I want to talk more about our food systems in a moment, but we've been talking about the Cavendish banana, which is what we most commonly see in the grocery store. But how many varieties of banana are out there, and how would you describe them? Just give us an idea of the range.

Well, there are more than 1,500 bananas that have been identified, and they have a bewildering array of different sizes and colours and flavours. In Eating to Extinction, I wrote about the Blue Java, which is from Indonesia and described as having a soft, unctuous texture and hints of vanilla ice cream. And then there's the Eli banana, which is one of the plants that was introduced to Hawaii by South Pacific settlers. That's actually picked green and cooked as a vegetable. And there are some types of banana that have tiny hints of strawberries or apple flavours. Some have almost fuzzy skins. And there's a Chinese banana that's so aromatic that its name, when translated, means you can smell it from the next mountain. So I think there's a huge amount of diversity that most of us have never experienced, probably will never experience, because these are bananas that actually need and are eaten in a local context and aren't suitable to that supply chain that we've been talking about that allows it to go from plantation to supermarket halfway around the world and in east africa there are a wide range of cooking bananas and there's also a banana type of a particular type of banana that's brewed into a beer that's then part of a wedding ceremony so the groom or the future groom will brew beer from bananas and it's a very long and intricate process where the bananas need to be fermented in pits and so it takes so much time and effort that the symbolism of a groom gifting this to his future bride's family is really important. And again, another example of how the banana fits into an entire culture, not just a food culture, but an entire culture. Yeah. As

you're describing these incredible bananas that I would love to be lucky enough to try one day, it's a great reminder of how removed we are from our food in some really fundamental ways. We kind of expect to see certain things at the grocery store when we go there. We expect to have bananas, even though they may not grow anywhere near us. But it also removes us from the monoculture of factory farms, as Wendell pointed out. And I think it would be really helpful to remind us why biodiversity in general is so important for our food ecosystem.

It's such an important and fascinating subject to explore because we could walk into a supermarket, a store, and see huge amounts of diversity. But it can be argued that that is a superficial kind of diversity because it's now become the kind of diversity that you will find in cities and towns all around the world, including the banana. And I think this is why the Cavendish and the Gros Michel before it, it's almost great symbols of what the food system have become because the thousands of uh different types of bananas that are out there take any one of the ingredients that we depend on or that we encounter in our daily lives and there is huge diversity there so whether it's wheat or rice maize apples So for example, here in England, where I'm talking to you from, a century ago, it was possible to eat an apple a day for four years without eating the same apple twice because there was that much diversity. And what we've really been successful at, you could argue, which has created the modern day food system, is to find the really high yielding, productive foods that we can grow on scale around the world and then make it available all year round at a relatively affordable price. You can also argue that story is catching up with us because there are no monocultures in nature. And Fernando was talking about the origins of these diseases, these fungal diseases, for example, which co-evolved with the wild banana. And what we've done is we've extracted these foods from that evolutionary process, created monocultures, these plantations with clones, nature is catching up nature is catching up with this system which is why biodiversity is so important because it gives us resilience and humans have interacted with around 20 000 plants that's what that's our food story as a as a species and we've shrunk that down to 12 commodities that we mostly depend on, three of which wheat, maize and rice provide the world with more than 50% of its calories. And what we've done is we've neglected, we've ignored and we've led these other foods, this diversity on a road to extinction. And I think this is the important point that Fernando just mentioned, that he's not trying to save one banana, but he's trying to find a way in which we can end up with a food system that does enable us to have more diversity. Climate change, erratic weather patterns, the need to reduce fossil fuels, all point to needing more diversity to give us greater for the future.

Fernando, as a scientist, how do you introduce biodiversity back into a food system that's lacked it for decades? Yeah,

it's a challenge. It's a big challenge because the system is established and the monoculture makes things easier for the industry. So everything is standard, size of the boxes, when to harvest, how much nutrition, how much chemicals apply. So everything is standard if you want to grow bananas. In Latin America, you want to grow bananas, the Cavendish bananas. In Latin America or in Philippines, you use the same standards because everything is standardized for the monoculture. If you want to introduce a new cultivar, everything has to be adapted again. Different types of harvesting, ripening, size of the boxes. We are lucky, I would say, because we are working with one of the big companies which can help us to introduce these new bananas, new diversity that we want to incorporate. You know that monoculture is a synonym of a domino effect. One disease can just make fall everything. But if you mix, let's say, different varieties in a field, probably one of the varieties that you have in between will stop the disease to spread faster, for example. And we know that many organisms that are related with every specific plant, which is called the biome in the soil, is specific for every variety, for every cultivar. And that also plays an important role in reducing the amount of inoculum, for example, of these pathogens.

Are there other foods or crops that you are concerned could go the same way as the Cavendish banana, Fernando?

Yes, definitely. Before working on banana, I worked on coffee. And coffee has the same problems. A very narrow genetic diversity, only one or max two varieties grown everywhere. So it doesn't matter. The sticker you see in the back is just one variety. It's the same with banana. It doesn't matter the sticker. It's just one. Cacao, avocado, all commodities are in risk, and not only crops, but also animal species. Many fish are in danger. And something very important also to clarify is that banana is not going to go extinct. It's going to go commercially extinct because Gros Michel is still grown in Latin America. If you want to eat Gros Michel, you can buy it there, you can eat it, but it's not commercially suitable anymore because the raised one is present everywhere. So the amount of bananas that you can produce is not sufficient. So Gros Michel still exists, still grows. Probably in 10, 20, 50 years, Cavendish will still grow, but probably will not be beneficial or commercially anymore. Dan,

what key lessons do you hope we take away from the work Fernando and others are doing?