Every Banana Explained

Every Banana Explained 🍌 This video walks fifteen sides of the world's most-consumed fruit — Gros Michel, the original commercial banana extinct in Western trade since 1965 and the secret behind why every banana-flavored candy tastes nothing like the supermarket fruit; Cavendish, the 99-percent-of-trade clone descended from a single 1834 mutation in the Duke of Devonshire's Derbyshire greenhouse; Plantain, the starchier cooking banana that underpins the daily caloric intake of 70 million people across Central Africa and the Caribbean; Red Dacca, the pink-fleshed maroon-skinned variety with three times the beta-carotene of yellow; Lady Finger sugar bananas with 30 percent more sweetness than Cavendish; Blue Java with its chalky pale-blue bloom and vanilla-custard flesh; Manzano, the Latin American apple banana eaten only at peak black-skinned ripeness; Burro, the square-cross-sectioned Mexican variety with a lemon undertone; Fe'i, the Pacific Islands' upward-pointing orange-fleshed banana that Lois Englberger's 1998 Go Yellow campaign used to counter Micronesian vitamin-A deficiency; Goldfinger, the disease-resistant Honduran research hybrid the supermarkets refused to switch to in 1989; Pisang Raja, the Indonesian royal banana behind every Pisang goreng street stall in Jakarta; Mysore, the South Indian variety registering the highest Brix sugar reading of any common banana; Praying Hands, the conjoined-finger Filipino variety with religious significance; Banana Republic, the term O. Henry coined in 1904 for the United Fruit Company's Central American empire; and Tropical Race 4, the soil fungus quietly working its way through Colombian plantations since 2019 toward a second Cavendish-scale collapse. Geography, fungi, and the politics of a Boston fruit company. Subscribe for more food explained.