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These stunning golden bananas may make you feel differently about GMOs.

Imagine you're eating a banana.

Photo from Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.

As you start to strip away the yellow peel, you notice that the inside seems different. Instead of the banana's flesh being a pale cream color, it's a rich golden-orange.

Would you eat that?

Because that's what scientists from Queensland University of Technology in Australia have created using genetic modification. And these golden bananas aren't just for show. They could save hundreds of thousands of kids a year from going blind, or even dying.

In the United States, bananas are smoothie ingredients and breakfast toppings. But in some parts of the world, they're as essential as bread.

[rebelmouse-image 19529331 dam="1" original_size="750x445" caption="Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr." expand=1]Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr.

Bananas are one of the world's staple crops. In West Africa, they're as important to the local diet as rice is to East Asia or potatoes were to the Irish. In parts of Uganda, the typical diet includes more than two pounds of bananas a day.

But no single food has all the vitamins and minerals a person needs to live, and without a varied diet, you can get sick. For bananas and the people who depend on them, it's vitamin A that's the problem — there isn't enough in the fruit.

Not getting enough vitamin A is a big deal, especially for children. It can weaken the immune system and stunt growth, and it's the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness in the world. Of the preschool-age children who die every year in Africa, about 6% die of not getting enough vitamin A.

The obvious answer would be to eat a more varied diet, but fresh fruits and meat can be costly, and many low-income farmers don't have the money.

But now scientists might have an easy way to add that oh-so-crucial vitamin into any banana they please.

Not all bananas lack vitamin A, but the ones they eat in Uganda do. You could try to crossbreed them with a vitamin-rich variety, but unfortunately, that wouldn't work. Domesticated bananas are sterile.

So scientists used genetic modification. Using genes from a vitamin-A-rich (but hard-to-grow) strain called Fe'i, QUT professor James Dale and his team loaded commercially viable banana seedlings with beta-carotene, a source of vitamin A.

[rebelmouse-image 19529332 dam="1" original_size="750x499" caption="Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr." expand=1]Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr.

It took some experimenting, but they were able to up the beta-carotene content in the fruit by more than 30 times — hopefully, enough to stave off vitamin A deficiency.

As an interesting side effect, the banana's flesh ended up turning a rich, golden yellow.

Beta-carotene isn't just a source of vitamin A. It's also a naturally occurring bright orange pigment. (It's responsible for giving carrots their color.)

As for taste, Dale says it was unaffected.

[rebelmouse-image 19529333 dam="1" original_size="750x441" caption="Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr." expand=1]Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr.

This particular project was just a proof of concept, but Dale and his colleagues have now given the technology to local Ugandan scientists, who'll start experimenting with Ugandan banana plants.

"They will be the leaders," Dale says.

Other attempts to use genetic modification to fortify foods have been met with skepticism and resistance. In 2013, a field of vitamin-A-enriched "golden rice" was vandalized and destroyed by protesters in the Philippines. But Dale says their project is different from commercial genetic modification. They're not patenting any of the technology, and since domesticated bananas are sterile, there shouldn't be any worry about cross-pollination.

This could be an easy, self-sustaining way to save hundreds of thousands of kids a year.

The hope is to start sharing the bananas with Ugandan farmers soon. Once they're out there, the farmers will be free — and encouraged — to give saplings to their friends and neighbors, as well.

People could be planting, eating, and sharing the golden bananas as soon as 2021.

Funding for professor Dale's project was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.K. Department for International Development.

Some people are going bananas about bananas possibly going extinct.

Save the bananas.

True

You may have heard that bananas are going extinct.

And it's sort of true: The banana as we know it isin danger. But that's also only part of the story.

To understand what’s happening with bananas today, we have to take a look at the bananas of years past ... because we’ve actually been in this situation before.

Years ago, the bananas found in grocery stores didn’t look or taste like the bananas we know now.

They looked like this:

The "original" banana: Gros Michel. Image via iStock.

By all accounts, those bananas apparently tasted better. Known as the Gros Michel strain, they were cloned and mass produced and shipped all around the world until their days as the reigning banana species were brought to an abrupt end. You know that deliciously sweet artificial banana flavoring that tastes nothing like a banana? Well, allegedly, that’s what the Gros Michel tasted like.

So, what happened? Why aren’t we still snacking on deliciously sweet candy-flavored bananas?

The Panama disease, a fungus that destroys any crop that’s susceptible to it, killed most of the supply, bringing the Gros Michel bananas to their knees more than a century ago.

With the Gros Michel banana near extinction, the banana industry went into a panic.

Farmers lost their crops and their livelihoods. The soil was tainted because of the Panama disease, so they couldn’t just start over.

But, luckily, there was a solution: One species of banana proved to be resistant to the Panama disease. It could be planted in the infected soil and would bear fruit — no problem. It was the Cavendish banana to the rescue.

The bananas we're used to seeing! The Cavendish. Image via iStock.

The Cavendish banana is what most of us think of when we think of bananas.

While there are other varieties of bananas sold in local markets, many of which taste sweeter and are fun shades like pink and red, the Cavendish was the best bet for farmers because of its resistance to the disease. It’s not as delicious as the Gros Michel, but it would have to do.

The banana trade made a mistake though: They treated the Cavendish pretty much the same way they did the Gros Michel the century before. Instead of diversifying their banana production, they cloned just the Cavendish and ratcheted up production until the Cavendish became the most dominant banana in the market. Today, about 99% of the bananas consumed worldwide are of the Cavendish variety.

But here’s the thing: Relying too heavily on one species of banana (or any other item, really) can be a mistake.

The red banana. Image via iStock.

That’s called monoculture cropping — growing a genetically similar or identical crop without introducing any variants. And while it bodes well for production because it’s much easier to mass produce genetically identical crop, it also means that the slightest change can put the entire crop at risk. One disease can kill them all.

That’s what happened with the Gros Michel. And it’s on the verge of happening again today with our beloved Cavendish.

The adorably fuzzy pink bananas. Image via iStock.

A new version of the original Panama disease is back with a vengeance, and it’s targeting the Cavendish.

The situation is bad, but it’s not dire — not yet at least. While it feels a bit like a ticking banana time bomb, scientists and banana-breeders are on the case.

They’re trying to mate plants that are resistant to the new disease together, to create offspring that are more likely to make it if this situation repeats itself. They’re creating bananas that are built to survive.

And the farmers and economies that depend on the banana trade? They’re working to diversify their crop and to identify already-resistant banana species that can be grown in soil that’s been compromised by the disease. They’re not just waiting for a solution, they’re creating one.

The adorably tiny Lady Finger bananas. Image via iStock.

Our banana history may be repeating itself, but don't cry yourself to sleep just yet.

This time, we might be ready for it.

We’ve learned that doing the same thing over and over again will probably yield the same results, so we’ve got to change it up. Who knows, maybe in a few years, we’ll find a variety of delicious banana breeds in stores for all of us to enjoy snacking on.