There are a lot of things Belgians know about bananas: the scientist Edmond De Langhe is probably the greatest living banana explorer. He’s spent much of his life traveling the world, looking for new species of the fruit. His specimens are stored at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; over 1,000 different banana types are kept there. The collection acts as both a way of preserving the fruit’s biodiversity in a rapidly-overdeveloping world, and as the raw material for future banana breeding. One of the Leuven bananas might hold the key to building a more disease-resistant version of the fruit. Much of the work in the attempt to find that grail banana is being overseen by Rony Swennen, a De Langhe protege and advocate (as I am) of the use of genetic modification to broaden the fruit’s experimental possibilities.
…more after the jump, including a correction…
But the Belgian banana world gets even more serious. In the clip above, a lesser-known genius demonstrates a mechanized banana peeler, made from a the innards of an old rotisserie machine. The fruit slowly turns, and eventually gets peeled. That the process takes up to five minutes is – to me – a small price to pay for such an advance in technology and the body of human knowledge as a whole.
CLARIFICATION: Anne Vézina, of Bioversity International – the primary group working to preserve the banana – rightfully corrects the above information: “When you talk about the collection you say it is stored at the Catholic University of Leuven, but in reality it is stored at the International Transit Centre, which is managed by Bioversity and hosted by the University. The collection is part of a network of gene banks held by the International Agricultural Research Centres of the CGIAR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.)”
I’ll be running a longer piece on Bioversity and its work during the next couple of weeks.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
