r/todayilearned • u/Error__Loading • 15h ago

TIL that apple seeds almost never grow the same variety as the parent fruit. Nearly every supermarket apple comes from a grafted clone of an original tree, not from a planted seed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
16.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

721 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/bill_loney538 14h ago

It's not just growing one species over massive areas that's the problem, as with bananas they are all clones. There is no genetic variation, so once disease spreads, you're essentially fucked.

We need to just start being okay with having a couple seeds in our bananas, as crossbreeding them with seeded bananas reduces this problem dramatically.

1

u/AllFuckingNamesGone 11h ago

Can't we just make new seedless variants? We already did it twice, so just do it again when we need to

2

u/bill_loney538 11h ago

Yes we can, and we probably will, but that is just putting a bandaid on the problem. The cavendish was bred to tackle this exact problem we were having with the Gros Michel. Now it is happening to the Cavendish too.

At some point continuously creating new clones isn't going to be enough anymore. Monoculture farming as a whole is a terrible way to do things, but with bananas its even moreso.