Posts Tagged: bananas

It's just a waste, II

A year ago, a co-worker wrote a post on this blog entitled “It’s just a waste.”  The sad facts of food waste are something we pay attention to since we work for the UC Postharvest Technology Center. A key component of our Center’s mission is to “reduce postharvest losses.” This topic also hits close to home on a personal level since I have always struggled with using up produce before it spoils. I go shopping about once a week, and tend to purchase just a bit more produce than what we will actually eat – in the hopes that one of us will suddenly adopt healthier eating habits by increasing our intake of fresh produce. I place the produce in my fruit ripening bowl, on the counter, or in the fridge, according to the recommendations on my handy produce storage chart. But nearly every week something goes awry, usually with my schedule, and I end up not serving the delicious produce-based meals I had planned, or I forget to pack my lunch, and oops, the negative effects of delayed consumption hit my produce.

The numbers show I’m not alone in this struggle, since research reports that nearly 30 percent of all produce losses in the United States happen at the consumer level. I was surprised to learn that today the average American consumer wastes nearly 50 percent more food than we did in the 1970s. (Link to the August 2012 Natural Resources Defense Council Report.) In the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nation's chart you can see that consumers from every other region around the world do significantly better than we in using their produce.

I want to do better, too! I hereby resolve to try harder to stick with my menu plan, pay closer attention to produce on the counter and the fridge (sometimes known affectionately in the produce industry as the “black hole”), and I will try very hard to be more creative in my use or preservation of quickly ripening produce.

My single biggest challenge is bananas. I try to buy a smaller hand of 5 to 6 bananas with some green tint left. They go on my banana hook in a cooler corner of my kitchen. At least half the weeks of the year those bananas have black spots within 3 to 4 days, and by day 5 there are usually 2 to 3 bananas left that are no longer appealing to my family. So almost half the bananas I buy usually don’t get eaten. I know, I know, “buy a smaller hand of bananas,” you say. That’s easier said than done, at least at the markets in which I shop.

Thankfully there are many cooks out there willing to share their recipes for creative ways to use up an over-supply of bananas. Below is a starting list of ideas that I’ll be drawing from as I make an effort to reduce produce waste, and especially banana waste, in our home.

• 
  Slice into 1-inch chunks, freeze in a single layer on a wax paper covered cookie sheet. Transfer into a zip-bag and return to the freezer to use as needed for fruit smoothies or other cooking projects
• Banana bread or banana muffins
• Homemade banana ice cream
• Banana layer cake with cream cheese frosting
• Slice lengthwise, sauté in butter and ¼ tsp. rum flavoring until golden brown, and serve on ice cream
• Banana crunch cookies
• Make banana pancakes, add chocolate chips if desired (here’s a link to a pancake recipe called “Chunky Monkey” my son-in-law likes to make)
• Peel, insert a lollipop or popsicle stick and freeze. Eat as is, or dip in melted chocolate.
• Banana drop cookies
• Slice, dip in fresh lemon juice, and dry in a dehydrator
• Make a warm spiced banana topping that’s great on ice cream or gingerbread
• Banana oatmeal bar cookies
• Banana pudding
• Fruit Skewers
• Bananas Foster
• Banana Daiquiri
• Tropical banana bar cookies with raisins, pecans and coconut
• Banana cream pie
• Peanut butter, banana and rum bar cookies
• Trifle
• Burrito Bananas Foster
• Fruit Salad
• Banana crepes
• Dessert Pizza
• Banana Bundt cake with caramel frosting
• Fruit salsa, served with cinnamon tortilla chips
• Banana split
• Strawberry-banana parfait with yogurt and granola

Researchers from Spain and U.S. discover 'seedless' cherimoya gene

Thanks to researchers in the United States and Spain, it may not be long before you find yourself packing a cherimoya, rather than an apple or banana, in your kids’ lunchboxes.

The researchers recently combined their expertise in an effort to show how to develop a seedless version of the Cherimoya – which Mark Twain called "the most delicious fruit known to man."

The cherimoya, also known as the custard apple, and the closely related sugar apple and soursop, all are known for having big, awkward seeds.  New seedless versions of these tasty fruits would undoubtedly be much more appealing to consumers.

"This could be the next banana — it would make it a lot more popular," said Charles Gasser, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at UC Davis.

He noted that, although all commercial banana varieties are seedless, bananas in their natural state have up to a hundred seeds.

The cherimoya project began in Spain, where researchers José Hormaza, Maria Herrero and graduate student Jorge Lora at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas labs in Malaga and Zaragoza, Spain, were studying the seedless variety of sugar apple. When they looked closely at the fruit, they noticed that the ovules, which would normally form seeds, lacked an outer coat.

They looked similar to the ovules of a mutant of the lab plant Arabidopsis that was discovered by Gasser's lab at UC Davis in the late 1990s. In Arabidopsis, the defective plants do not make seeds or fruit. But the mutant sugar apple produces full-sized fruit with white, soft flesh without the large, hard seeds.

The Spanish team contacted Gasser, and Lora came to UC Davis from Malaga to work on the project in Gasser's lab. He discovered that the same gene was responsible for uncoated ovules in both the Arabidopsis and sugar apple mutants.

"This is the first characterization of a gene for seedlessness in any crop plant," Gasser said.

Although there are seedless varieties of other commercial fruit crops in the grocery story, those are usually achieved by selective breeding. And – since the plants have no seeds – they are reproduced using plant cuttings or other methods of vegetative propagation.

Gasser is hopeful that discovery of this new gene could open the way to produce seedless varieties in sugar apple, cherimoya and perhaps other fruit crops.

In addition to its implication for commercial crops, the team’s research also sheds light on the evolution of flowering plants, Gasser said. Cherimoya and sugar apple belong to the magnolid family of plants, which branched off from the other flowering plants quite early in their evolution.

"It's a link all the way back to the beginning of the angiosperms," Gasser said, referring to the large group of plants and trees characterized by having flowers and seeds.

The researchers published a paper on describing their work in the March 14 issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their research was funded by grants from the Spanish government, the European Union and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

 

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