In the U.S., most people only have access to the Cavendish, a slender, slightly curved banana with a cheerful shade of yellow. Around the world, however, there are thousands of varieties to know and love—here are a few.
The more you think about bananas, the stranger a concept they seem: Almost all bananas are grown in tropical climates, yet they feel as much a staple in North American grocery stores as our native apples. But unlike apples, there’s only one variety of banana available to most people in the United States: the Cavendish, a slender, slightly curved banana with a cheerful shade of yellow.
Through aggressive marketing and campaigning stateside, fruit companies were able to cement the banana as an affordable American staple, and the fruit has since become a go-to snack and common baking ingredient in many households. Today, bananas are deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, so much so that bananas are consistently the most popular fresh fruit purchased in the United States.
Because the Gros Michel is a sterile variety of banana that virtually lacks seeds, cultivating the banana requires cloning it through asexual propagation. While this creates a perfectly consistent product, it also produces genetically identical fruit. In short: a threat to one Gros Michel banana tree is a threat to every Gros Michel banana tree, which, in this case, would endanger the entire banana industry.
Instead of fixing the issue at hand by changing their farming practices, United Fruit Company simply picked a similar banana—the Cavendish—to quietly replace the Gros Michel. Today, the Cavendish is asexually cloned in the exact same manner the Gros Michel was.
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