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>> 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.
> we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving
That's not a problem with "big food" - the food is far too nutritious and abundant. Sugary cereals for children and big macs can't be described at "just keeping us from starving".
We want restricted (but complete) nutrition that is just enough to keep us from starving, so that we maintain our size and don't end up with an energy abundance that causes processes like fat storage and inflammation to run wild.
Even outside "big food", the virtue of trying to maximize "tasty" means that our home cooking is also driven by food addiction - "big food"'s laser focus on this makes them much more effective in making addictive foods at the lowest cost, in turn making the healthier options seem "bland".
Our bodies and food reward systems are not geared for this abundance of concentrated nutrition.
It's only "good" if the tastier versions of food don't come with even more nutrition that we cannot handle. Carrots in their natural form are for example not at all as large, sweet and nutritious as the orange things we have now. They were bitter and bland.
There are different meanings or measures of what nutritious and taste mean, which I feel like is contributing to miscommunications here.
Nutrition as you define it seems to be purely calories. Another definition would be complete micronutrient profile.
Taste as you define it seems to be fat, sugar, salt. Another definition would be complexity of taste.
Big food currently optimizes for the first definitions of above which is bad for long term health. Second definitions of above would be better for long term health.
> 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.
I am a consumer and do not expect year-round availability of fruit and vegetables.
"I don't fit in a generalisation therefore that generalisation is not true". At the same time, not sure we have the data to back up the original argument. Personal anecdata? People around do expect to find everything all year round, and they get mad if they don't.
An experiment: walk into a diner in mid-winter and ask for a BLT.
Agreed, I think the statement should be "supermarkets want to sell us products all year round".
> it will taste bland and boring
There are plenty of examples of produce bred for color, size, and shelf-life over flavor (e.g. tomatoes). In general, the fruits and vegetables we have today are fantastically more delicious and edible than long ago. Watermelon might be the best example of this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-pa...
> we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving
That's not what the ongoing obesity epidemic shows.
Obese != well nourished. You can be obese yet have nutritional deficiencies that show in one way or another.
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.
the small one you mention may be what is called karpooravalli in Tamil.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-English-name-for-the-Karpo...
commonly available in South India.
then there is the hill banana, also small like the one above. grows in the Palani Hills in Western Tamil Nadu, at least. maybe in other hilly places too. it may be the same as the above one. not sure.
one of the best banana varieties for flavour, not just sweetness, is the nendran or nendrapazham, grown in Kerala, and maybe in western Tamilnadu.
it's slightly larger than, and looks different from, the common banana. the outer surface is somewhat ridged, like a ridge gourd.
it can be eaten either raw or cooked. very different taste from the common banana.
considered a delicacy.
https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/Nendran_Bananas_23405.p...
At This Banana Farm, the Bunches Grow in 430 Shapes and Sizes - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-many-kinds-bananas...
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.
Might be dwarf Cavendish which is what they grow on the Canary Islands in Spain. It's abut 1/2 the size of the full Cavendish and to me taste slightly better.
Went back to the market this morning:
Those bananas were dwarf Cavendish. And the farmer said " .. and we don't treat them with (ethylene) gas."
it is not a one-off. this is commonly done in India. in fact people even put a branch of bananas into a steel storage drum full of raw rice to help them to ripen. I don't know the science behind it.
Ripening fruit/veges give off ethylene oxide which causes further ripening.
If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.
Here in the tropics fruit ripens very quickly (chemical reactions proceed faster with increased temperature). I try to slow that down by keeping the stuff cold in the fridge. (But the fridge traps the EtO anyway!)
I fell in love with Apple Bananas in Hawaii. Highly recommend.
I'm afraid I will love Hawaii itself too much if I go there to visit. :)
that Hotel Hawaii song ...
"you can never leave" :)
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.
> Unripe bananas contain mostly starch, which makes up 70–80% of their dry weight. Much of that starch is resistant starch, which is not digested in the small intestine. For that reason, it's often classified as dietary fiber. However, bananas lose their starch as they ripen.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/green-bananas-good-or-b...
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.
Developing new artificial flavors is very expensive, is the explanation I've heard.
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.
That's an urban myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_production_in_Iceland
oh thats a shame - i quite liked that piece of trivia :(
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.
I assume that bananas that ripen naturally also taste better than those picked green, shipped halfway across the world and then ripened in ripening chambers? I tried various bananas in South America, but not a naturally ripened Cavendish, so I can't say for sure, but I know that this is the case for tomatoes.
Yeah, tomatoes only taste of tomato in the heart of summer, and even then you better be in a place that produces them rather than one that imports them.
I'm guessing that's because tomatoes are fruit and fruit always tastes better when it's in season. For instance, I wonder if I've ever known the true taste of ripe mango. I have eaten plenty of mangoes, but I only ever eat them in the UK, where they're imported. I suspect that they taste very differently (as in much better) if you pick them from a tree in the right season. I bet South-East Asians in the UK must turn their noses up to the local mango supply, like I do with, well, most veg really.
Oh jesus this author also has the Tolstoy virus.
Title of this entry needs a (2023) after it.
I doubt bananas have changed much in the last 15 months.
You can never be too sure.
I'm eager to try blue bananas! I hear they are great.
You mean this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana I kid, I kid.
almost exactly opposite in a geographical sense, is the Rub' al Khali (The Empty Quarter):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali
i don't kid. it's huge, and mainly empty. I first read about it in an English children's novel about Arabia, as a kid.