I was wondering if anyone ever had the Gros Michel cultivar. My understanding is until the 1950s it was the main type of banana. When it became a victim of a fungus disease it was replaced by the Cavendish variety.
I was googling around and most people say how superior the flavor of Gros Michel bananas were.
I see you can still buy them but as I googled more and more, many people were saying the Gros Michel you can buy today are not the same as the varitey from the 1950s and before.
So has anyone ever had a Gros Michel banana? And what do you think of the flavor as compared to today’s Cavendish?
The Cavendish became the banana of choice, based upon its shipping capabilities (ripens after picking, green fruit resistant to bruising). The flavor is not the best-but other varieties are now available. I like the little Golden Bananas-but they rot very quickly.
You know, the destruction of the Cavendish banana as the default export banana crop is taking longer than I thought. I was looking forward to seeing a wide variety of different cultivars available, but nope, it’s still all Cavendish all the time, except sometimes a sad little pile of beaten-up red bananas or baby bananas.
Cavendish is the banana equivalent of the Red Delicious apple, which used to be ubiquitous. You can still find Red Delicious, but the supermarkets are packed with new cultivars, and every year new ones that I’ve never heard of come on the market. It’s awesome. Come on Panama disease race 4, get moving!
Don’t hold your breath, Lemur866. If the Cavendish does get knocked out of the marketplace, it’ll just be replaced by some other single cultivar, and that cultivar is going to be picked based on the same criteria as the Cavendish was: Ships well, looks appealing, and only after that based on flavor.
The Cavendish will be knocked out of its throne, because it’s also got a blight going around killing the Cavendish plants.
The problem with bananas is they’re all basically clones. There’s no genetic diversity within a variety to help it, as a species, recover from a disease.
Gros Michels were supposedly creamier in texture, according to the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.
Well, I’m old enough to remember eating bananas in the 50s, and although I was too young to care about whether they were Gros Michel bananas, I can tell you that they were different in a several ways. First, they were more flavorful. Modern bananas have a very bland flavor compared to what I remember. Similar to how modern tomatoes have almost no flavor compared to the ones I grew up with.
Also, the skin was much thinner. The other thing I started noticing was the way newer bananas ripen differently. Older bananas skins turned a very bright yellow color all over. Newer bananas seem to turn some grayish/greenish/yellowish color.
You’re not the boss of me, Chronos. I’ll hold my breath if I want to. I just don’t want to.
But it doesn’t have to be a single-cultivar monocrop replacement for the Cavendish, does it? Yes, cultivars for export have to have certain characteristics–delayed ripening, thick unblemished skin, and so on. But can’t we have several varieties duking it out? It seems to be that the ubiquity of the Cavendish is some sort of collusion between banana growers–they don’t have to compete on taste, everyone produces the exact same product at commodity prices.
But we’ve had an explosion of produce varieties in the last 20 years, and the produce growers aren’t going broke, they’re producing more and more, and are able to charge premium prices for high quality varieties. Why can’t banana growers step it up?
I used to eat bananas as a child but had to stop when I got older because they began giving me a bad case of heartburn. Does anybody else have this problem and are Cavendish bananas more likely to cause indigestion than Gros Michels?
Although there are dozens of wild and cultivated banana strains around the world, there’s a good chance that the last banana you ate is from the Cavendish cultivar group in the Musa acuminata banana family. If you live in a nation where there are no native bananas or banana crops, that chance approaches nearly 100% as 47% of all bananas grown for international export around the globe are the Cavendish type.
While that’s true today, the Cavendish type bananas didn’t always dominate the international growing/exporting scene. Up until the 1950s, the dominant banana type in both total pounds grown and exported was the Gros Michel cultivar. Unfortunately, a nasty fungus wiped out almost the entire global crop and production levels never rose back to their pre-1950s level as the cultivar was replaced.
Not only is this an interesting bit about the history of the banana, but it also explains one of life’s little mysteries: why candy that is “banana” flavored doesn’t taste anything like the bananas you buy at the store. The recipe for artificial banana flavoring was cooked up in the early 20th century and the food scientists who created it used the Gros Michel banana as a model. As such, artificial banana flavoring does in fact taste like bananas, just not the ones you’re regularly eating.