this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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They'll be gone in 10-15 years? The current popular version anyway. A fungi is destroying them.
It happened before back in the fifties with the last version. Except there's nothing really close this time. The other types of bananas aren't close at all
That old version "Gros Michel" is what artificial banana flavour is based on. Bananas used to taste like that. The newer "Cavendish" variety is firmer and lasts longer, but doesn't have the same flavour. It seems like both are being wiped out by disease though, yay monoculture.
Cavendish seem to be especially vulnerable because they're all clones. They don't produce viable seeds, so they're grafted to new plants.
Might've gone on a search bout baanas last night. I now prefer goldenfinger, a type AA cultivar I have never seen in my entire life.
There is already a gene modified cavendish that is resistant to the fungi, but it's not legal in the EU so it's not being used yet
Its been working ok with apples
I misunderstood.
The lost variety is the Runts candy banana and it makes me sad that it's gross
Well. Artificial flavoring is typically identifying 1 or 2 compounds that occur within a fruit, whereas the fruit has dozens of these compounds. Imagine what artificial apple flavoring is to green apples - that's what Runts is to the Gros banana.
You can still get the Gros in some places but it's not grown at scale, has to be isolated.
Are you an AI?
Nope, all dirty fleshbag. I just like knowing things and hope others do too. :)
autism for the win yeah :)
Gros Michel and many other bananas are clones, too. So are apples.
Not all apples, but many. Including Macintosh, which was found along a road and could never produce viable seeds. There were only three trees for like 30 years before people noticed that they tasted rather good. All Macintosh apples today are grafts of the one surviving tree.
kind of like the other Macintosh
What?
Maybe, but they are right (AI or fleshbag). I love artificial banana flavour way more then the current banana and have dived deep into the madness that is the banana industry. We are eating lies when we could have been eating Gros Michels if only greed did not prevail.
god no do not bring back Gros Michels, artificial banana flavour is bleh
i suppose soon we'll have to compromise and start liking (or not) a new banana flavour though, if that banana disease gets to the current version
Agreed. I accidentally bought tropical antacids and like 50% of them are banana flavor. I'd rather just have indigestion
Blasphemy!
Hate to tell ya but I had the same inverted experience. "How come this gross artificial banana tastes nothing like bananas?! Ohhhh....".
It does kinda drive me nuts though, not knowing what the real deal tastes like. Can only imagine, for you!
My introduction to banana flavor was the penicillin liquid medicine as a kid, I got in a bit of trouble drinking the whole bottle at night, and more trouble by doing it to every bottle I could find later (my siblings illness was a small price to pay). I have been chasing that high of flavor ever since. My parents tried to give me "real" bananas after but they are but a pale imitation that only dulls the edge of my craving.
Haunted, made ravenous, beastly, low - by knowledge of a flavor too pure for this world. Left lurching, bereft, cursed to sin against kith and kin, searching desperately, urgently, for a satisfaction that can never be born.
The heavens weep!
ooh so that's what that is
i heard an old man mysteriously whisper "enjoy your bananas while they still exist, young person" to me at the supermarket a while ago and i didn't know what they were talking about but they sounded very serious so i didn't doubt them.
Clones fall behind the arms race that nature is. Seedless bananas so far seem to last decades
sexuality ftw!