Bananas Don't Taste Like They Used To. Here's Why

>> Consumers these days expect year-round availability of a product, which is consistent every time a person buys it, eats it, and cooks with it.

It's like a fairy tale witch cursed us all for our greed: you will have any food you like any time you like it, but it will taste bland and boring and you will long for a taste you have never known.

That's why people get so protective of their food culture, even their food habits (like meat-eaters getting up in arms when they hear from vegans). It's because if we leave food completely at the hands of big food, we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving and just good enough to eat to keep us from all going mad.

The article doesn't go far enough back in time to flesh out quite how absurd the Cavendish story is as a tale of exploitation. After centuries of generational wealth transfer in the Cavendish family, it was developed by gardeners working for a Duke who was sent some as a gift from the recently invaded colony of Mauritius (the British overthrowing previous French colonists).

They were grown in the middle of England in the largest greenhouse in the world (heated by 8 coal fired furnaces requiring so much fuel that a small railway was installed). It sat a few minutes walk from a house (one of 8 the Duke inherited), literally covered in gold so it would look nice during sunsets.

The bananas won a horticultural prize in London and were then shipped off around the world - setting the scene for where the article picks up.

South India has a pretty diverse collection of banana species, even from my limited experience. You have red bananas; plantains; and these very small (some are about the length of a finger) and delicate yellow bananas known locally as Yelakki, among others.

I recently bought a batch of six bananas from a local farmer's market - they were very fresh and very green and smaller, having just been picked. I let them ripen at home over the next 3 days.

They tasted very much better than my usual rather tasteless supermarket-bought bananas. I'm going to try the exercise again tomorrow to check whether this was a one-off or not.

After reading the article, I'm going to check with the grower whether or not these were Cavendish bananas which are the norm around this banana-growing area, or something else.

I fell in love with Apple Bananas in Hawaii. Highly recommend.

https://hawaiiancrown.com/apple-bananas/

PSA: unripe bananas are medicinal, if you struggle with a "sensitive GI tract" I highly recommend trying to eat an at least slightly green banana every morning.

I have been very curious to try a Gros Michel after learning that the common artifical banana flavor is supposed to taste like them, not like the post-Panama Disease bananas.

I wonder how it is that we keep using this heirloom banana flavoring even after everyone's assumptions about what a proper banana tastes like changed.

Thai bananas taste at least 3 times as good as regular Cavendish. A much stronger fruity flavor

As an aside - Europes largest producer of bananas is... Iceland.

The Freakonomics podcast [1] did a whole episode on this topic. It's one of the more fascinating episodes in my opinion, and I can't eat a banana now without thinking about the Gros Michel.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-interesting-fruit-...

It's easy to underestimate the enormous magnitude of the worldwide problem of monocropping, but the banana helps illustrate the scale.

The title is click baity, here is the paragraph answering the question:

> This is precisely what happened in the early to mid-20th century. Panama disease, a wilt-causing fungus, evolved to attack one Gros Michel banana tree. It was then able to infect all the Gros Michel banana trees which were planted in close quarters with one another on these massive banana plantations. Only by switching the crop to a new banana that American consumers would like [-Cavendish] —one that was similar to the Gros Michel in color and shape, but was genetically distinct from it—could the banana industry save itself from collapsing. In the process, though, we lost the better banana.

The Canary Islands produce some good bananas, they're a bit smaller but sweeter

If you ever try bananas from Philippines, the Latundan is great. In general, once you taste how good all the different bananas can be, you'll never want to just go back to the Cavendish which is mostly boring.

Oh jesus this author also has the Tolstoy virus.

Title of this entry needs a (2023) after it.

I'm eager to try blue bananas! I hear they are great.