BANANAS OF THE PAST & FUTURE - Comparing the Gros Michel with the Cavendish and Goldfinger 

Gerard PF true

What about Emmy?

Wilbur soot

fascinating thanks for the extra info. it's interesting to know it originally may have been sourced from the gros michel, but it's such a flaw in logic to think that means gros michel tastes like banana candy. I'm not sure where that rumor started

@@WeirdExplorer I've had a banana in Thailand that tasted almost exactly like synthetic banana flavouring. No idea what the variety is called though.

@@WeirdExplorer While it is commonly stated that isoamyl acetate came to be used as banana flavouring because of the gros michel (it was never *sourced* from it, its always been synthesized artificially because thats way easier), it seems to have been used as banana flavouring *before* the gros michel became widespread in the US, and may be the reason that specific banana variety became popular.

@@Magmafrost13 Isoamyl acetate (banana oil) is an alarm pheromone for bees and wasps and is present in bananas. Bees//wasps can smell it in parts per billion. I made it in organic chemistry and a drop of the stuff melted a hole through five pages of my lab notebook. In Asia this flavoring is available but I wouldn't recommend spilling it on clothing or using it as perfume. It doesn't wash out completely, has a half-life of up to 14 days on stable surfaces and you will have bees and wasps chasing you. That is why if a bee/wasp gets crushed you can smell banana. The alarm pheromone is released when the bee/wasp stings. Excluding killer (Africanized) bees, one angry bee/wasp riles up fifty more of them. One angry killer bee riles up five hundred more of them.

this literally looks like a bud tender explaining how terpines create further distinctions within indica and sativa lol.

Cause a businessman is only interested in making money. More varieties means complications in the short term, and could confuse the public message.. it's more of a gamble, but could also create stability long term...

@@Unsensitive Why are there multiple varieties of oranges and other fruits for sale then? Why are businessmen only obsessed with making money with bananas, not so much with other fruits?

@@Pseudoplasmagore Cavendish bananas are super cheap, any other banana cultivar will be substantially more expensive. Cavendish bananas are the cheapest fresh fruit you can buy by a large market, at least where I live. Even red delicious apples, the cavendish banana of apples, cost twice as much by weight. That higher price makes it more reasonable to introduce slightly more expensive but higher quality apple cultivars, and by now my local market regularly stocks a veritable rainbow of apples. Also, apples at least are locally grown throughout much of the United States. Yes, most are grown in a few states, but smaller quantities are grown from Maine down to Georgia, as well as across the Pacific coast, and likely in the Mississippi valley. Those smaller orchards maintained some presence of other cultivars even when red delicious dominated the supermarket produce section. Bananas are not locally grown in most of the United States or Europe, they are imported from much poorer countries where the farms are run by big corporate interests that only care about what they know will sell. Not sure about oranges, but I know they are locally grown in southern Europe as well as several states in the United States, so that probably helped maintain some variety in those markets when corporate farms were driving the market toward monoculture. Edit: Also, it's kind of tough to produce new varieties of seedless fruit. Not impossible - they came from somewhere after all - but harder than, say, apples, where the fruit has seeds and thus the trees can reproduce naturally easily enough. With apples, you just plant seeds, wait for them to grow fruiting trees, and see which trees produce marketable fruit. It's time consuming and not actually easy in terms of effort, but it's not nearly the same challenge as producing completely new cultivars of a plant whose fruit is seedless, and whose traditional cultivation technique is, essentially, cloning.

@@richardkenan2891 To be fair, apple cultivation is mainly cloning as well- If you plant apple seeds from a store-bought apple, it won't grow into the same variety it came from. So, it's easier to grow new apple varieties by seed, but you won't know what that variety will taste like/be until the tree matures after a few years, and assuming that it turns out to be a bad variety, you'll have to start all over again from seed. That's why hardly any new apple varieties come out nowadays compared to back in the day- no one has time for that anymore. It sucks, honestly. I'd rather have dozens of varieties of apples, and different exotic fruits to choose from in the supermarket/fruit stands, but I guess that's not how business is made

@@Unsensitive This maybe true, but if we the consumers demand more options and create a market where money can be made then an entrepreneur will bring these new products to market

Loquats are great, though. Cut them with a little apple and they make a gorgeous chutney.

Could be three things going on at once: a tastier cultivar, grandmother bias, and eating tree ripened fruit. Like, the difference between a grocery store peach and picking one from the tree is so different I could see banana having a similar effect.

Funny, I also found Gros Michels in exploration at 80s in the Canary Islands. I thought it was a rare case of insularity, but in the Continuous States.

Your gran sounds like a RIGHTEOUS SAN DIEGO WOMAN.

Loquats are so under appreciated!

As Jared can attest, poor Madagascar can do with some intervention from botanists, ecologists and conservationists right now!

Well, I thought it just meant that the Gros Michel tastes more similar to synthetic banana flavour than the cavendish does, I mean obviously no fruit will taste exactly like its synthetic flavouring version. Natural fruits just produce too many different chemicals that we perceive as flavours.

I thought this too! They say this in documentaries and stuff and it's so misleading

Gros Michel is here in abundance in Africa.

Maybe the future one will be a Gold Digger, good luck.

Hahaha, good one

Gross Michelle and her boyfriend, Goldfinger

What's dating a banana like

Yeah me too

Pretty girl, beware of this heart of gold! This heart is cold!

It's much more complex to mass produce other types and they'd likely be far more expensive. Whole systems are set up to harvest and ship Cavendish types and have been for 60+ years.

very few banana types survive global storage and shipping. In more tropical areas, there are dozens of local banana varieties. The ones in other places aren't the tastiest, but instead are the types that can be mass produced with consistent quality and stored and shipped globally - ripening in transit, but not bruising or rotting before being sold.

@@Kingramze I've heard that the reason why we don't see the purple/red bananas in stores is because they don't have a long shelf life. But I don't see why they couldn't develop yellow banana cultivars with similar storage qualities to Cavendish. Here in Austria we have regular Cavendish bananas and the dessert bananas by Chiquita, which have a similar flavor to Cavendish but are half the size, sweeter and more dense. Then rarely in organic supermarkets, you get apple bananas, which have a slight fruity flavor in addition. Those are quite good. So there are already other bananas in stores, just very few of them. The companies don't try to change up the market or diversify their product lineup if Cavendish still sells well.

I hope that the popularity of applewood smoked bacon means that orchards of Red Delicious are being replaced...

@Gary Nelson ahhh that makes so much sense, this was a good read thank you all

Nah, it's a terrible banana

... and a cat lick itself.

@MUHAMMAD IKMAL SOLIHIN BIN MOHD SHUKRI - They are definitely berries, by the botanical definition.

@@nelumbonucifera7537 no, by botanical definition, they arent berries

@kingpest13 I'm a berry

A lot of sources say its a herb related to ginger but others say its a berry I am confused now

@@absolutelybagel2218 we're a berry

i’m glad i’m not the only one that noticed that lol. so cute

I mean, we do. The variety of fruits and veg available to you year round is greater than at basically any other time in history.

Renae Bettenhausen there’s a lot in like Fredmyers it’s just people are to scared to buy them

Because bananas has not seeds and all of them are basically a clone of the other, this is because the plates has very easy to infect other plants.

basically, Cavendish have a thick skin, which makes them easier and cheaper to ship.

Ray Munger that’s wrong, cavendish was harder to transport than gro Michel as it’s skin was delicate which forced companies to improve packaging to prevent damage. Gros michel was easy to transport, basically it was thrown into trucks as it is from the branch as it has a very tough skin. The companies down graded from a robust banana to something more delicate

Your mother is a smart lady! I can relate to what she says about the grassy / starchy taste of Cavendish...probably the reason I stopped eating bananas and now only rarely have them because the taste is generally disappointing... sad but true

butterfinger changed its recipe!?! dang nab it

@@Parisloverable sold to another company that "improved" the recipe. like anyone has ever complained 🙄

@@Parisloverable they did, and they're not good.

Noooo they were my favorite. It's going to be green apple skittles all over again.

Travel to the Philippines you can try 5 to 10 varieties.

That's interesting. Personally I find that unripe bananas are more tart and have a more interesting flavor profile.

Before artificially genetically modifying fruits, grains, and veggies, humans naturally crossbred and used other plants to create rich diversity. Australia is a perfect example of this. The indigenous people used a combination of plants to prevent the soil from drying out, now that the land is no longer being maintained like that, it is slowly becoming a desert again.

okay, only rich people get to eat them outside of the tropics then.

@@skuzzbunny I don't think you understood their comment. They're not saying to stop growing bananas. They're saying to stop growing only one variety of banana.

FINALLY someone says it

Durian flavoring is the same way. It doesn’t taste like durian, it’s just the one overwhelming component of durian.

Nice! I had the goldfinger at going bananas, good stuff. I didn't try the hybrid though. I'll have to try and find the Kandrian too... so many bananas

What's the melody?

@@ammefan Goldfinger the Bond movie's main theme

Wtf

*gros Michel autocorrect is a menace.

True. Its enough money where it isn't just an impulse buy for most people. The only way I could justify it is getting a few people to chip in 5, 10, 15 bucks or so and have a tasting party when the box shows up. But first I'd have to convince enough people to toss in $5-15.

Request it for a gift

Well, at least with bananas to have genetic diversity you need to bananas that can sexually reproduce, AKA are full of rock hard seeds. It's also important to note that most commonly available fruits are also monocultures, it's just that they're much easier to breed than bananas. Not to mention that not having a monoculture also means that the plants would have different ripening times, fruit qualities, growth habits, shipping conditions, etc. It would be a logistical nightmare to make such fruit available to consumers.

Yes! i often save bananas until they’re overripe, then freeze them and either make them into ice cream or banana bread. You’re so right. When they’re overripe, Cavendish absolutely taste like artificial banana!

Some people will for sure. My vote is for the Banana companies to put out another banana in mass along side the Cavendish for the same price, so when it does go the way of the dodo then it won't be as much of a shock. Its why New Coke bombed, they took away the classic instead of giving an alternative.

could be an apple banana.. those have been popping up a bit more in my neighborhood

Thank you!

Paul G that lakatan in Philippines. Is the one I missed. I tried to find here some in Canada. But unfortunately, the taste is not the same. And it’s not lakatan either 😔

I second that. I think having two available options would be helpful for when the Cavendish kicks it.

Cool! Hope your experiments go well

Honestly tho. I wouldn't mind more variety when it comes to bananas just in general, not even regarding the diseases and fungi

I'm seeing small apple or lady finger bananas in my local grocery, Kroger. Sometimes red bananas too.

@@professorm4171 Also plantains are starting to become more common too. IMO, they have a more complex flavour.

Yeah, i don't get it either and to me it feels like the toilet paper debate and people who peel bananas by the stem are the same that hang their toilet paper under instead of over. Anyway, peeling it the way he did in this video not only is harder as you have to apply more force on the stem end, it also is much more probable to break the banana in half and it's a way to preserve the bitter tip on the banana as you peel it. The other way around, the moment you put your thumb on the end of it, not only you need barely any force, you're also extracting the bitter tip as you peel it.

interesting!

I've done a few of those. Plan on doing more in the future :)

there's no comparison once you try a good variety

@@WeirdExplorer you are not wrong!

Why, Cavendish is so good

It's really lame and there's better bananas in the market

I saw a comment saying its a chemical compound that exists in bananas. So maybe it is based on it.......but it still doesn't taste like it!

@@WeirdExplorer Could be! We made it in Chem 101. It's, like, a fraction of a tenth of a fraction of a molecular chain away from nail polish remover.