OH BOY AM I GLAD YOU ASKED. SIT DOWN, BUCKLE UP, AND HANG ONTO YOUR HATS BECAUSE YOU UNLOCKED MY BANANA KNOWLEDGE. YOU DID THIS AND NOW WE ALL HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.
Bananas are kind of a side passion of mine, so much so that I read over 15 books on them in the span of a semester. My senior year in college I was all about studying bananas and let me tell you…
…they’re fucking bananas.
Without going into the long, grueling history of the crop itself, I’ll start by saying: Bananas, like corn, are one of man’s marvels of selective breeding and domestication. When bananas were first cultivated, they were only a few inches long, and almost completely seed. We’ve since bred them to be the fruit we know today.
And have you taken a look at the inside of a banana lately? It looks like this:
(Ignore my laptop in the background.) But, that small black dot you see there? That would have been a seed if, y’know, bananas still had those.
Just like most commercial grapes, bananas are seedless.
Which gets to your question: How do they grow more of them?
Bananas are clonal. Take the DNA from any banana you can buy at the grocery store and analyze it, and it will be the same. There’s only one major type of banana left on the market for mass production: the Cavendish. However, you can sometimes, rarely, get an oddly good tasting banana that is a little smaller and fatter than the Cavendish, and that is most likely the last of the Gros Michel, the first widely cultivated banana for the commercial market. Finding these is getting harder and harder, and I haven’t found one myself since I was about 15 or 16 (15 years ago,) but it’s a banana I will never forget the flavor of.
New banana plantations are created by taking and cultivating either tissue samples and cultivating those (called tissue culture) or by taking the suckers that pop up from the mother plant and planting those. Banana plants have rhizomes, a kind of root/stem system that runs underground and sends up new shoots from points called nodes, which is what makes taking and planting those suckers possible.
Tissue culture is very expensive and requires a lot of specialized equipment, up to and including sterile lab environments, whereas cultivation via sucker is faster and much cheaper. Most commercial banana cultivation is done via sucker propagation.
And that, my friend, is how more bananas are cultivated!