Bananas Don't Taste Like They Used To. Here's Why

As you cut sweet, creamy, and slightly airy slices of yellow banana into your morning cereal, it may be hard to imagine the familiar fruit tasting any different. Like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, most Americans are unaware that today’s yellow banana is like a shadow of the one that preceded it—a yellow banana with a sweeter flavor, firmer texture, and better culinary versatility was once the norm. The long, curved, school-bus yellow banana that America first marveled at was a variety called the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike.”

When the yellow banana came to the United States in the late 1800s, most Americans hadn’t tasted anything like it before. For almost three quarters of a century, large produce corporations—especially Chiquita and Dole—imported the Gros Michel banana into the United States for the mass commercial market. The fruit was assimilated into the American diet, commonly depicted as a breakfast staple and, of course, often used in desserts. It was the Gros Michel’s flavor that was supposedly in mind when chemists developed artificial banana flavoring, which may explain why artificial banana flavor doesn’t taste much like the yellow bananas we eat today. And if you’ve ever baked a recipe for banana bread or banana cream pie written before 1960, it was probably engineered around the flavor of this particular variety.

America loved the Gros Michel, and the cultivation practices used to meet the demand for our appetite for this tastier banana ultimately caused it to vanish. By 1960, the Gros Michel was nearly impossible to find, and a new banana had become the default: the Cavendish.

What was so great about the Gros Michel?

Reliable accounts of what the Gros Michel tasted like back in its heyday are scant. After years of engrossing myself in the lore of the Gros Michel, as well as years spent making banana desserts in culinary school and in my family’s bakery, I began to wonder: How did the first banana America fell in love with originally make these classic desserts taste? 

For a long time, I casually searched for the Gros Michel. I knew it would be difficult to find in stores, though from what I’d read the variety still existed. The longer I searched and the more I paid attention, the more it became incredibly clear to me how many bananas this country has for sale. Bodegas, convenience stores, airport kiosks, chain grocery stores, corporate cafeterias, hotel breakfast buffets—everywhere I happened upon a yellow banana, it was always a Cavendish.

Finally, one day, I was pleasantly surprised to find an online Gros Michel retailer called Miami Fruit. I ordered a small box of Gros Michel bananas and patiently waited for them to arrive at my door but realized I didn’t quite know how to qualitatively judge one banana against another. To truly understand how the elusive Gros Michel from years past compares to the Cavendish that litters produce stands today, I knew I had to speak with a bona fide fruit expert.

After a raw taste test, it was time to make dessert. I started with my favorite banana dish, comparing two batches of bananas Foster side by side. The difference in flavor was extremely subtle, and the two friends I roped into the taste test came to the conclusion the two dishes tasted slightly different but only if you were paying attention. A very obvious difference between the two desserts, however, was how well the banana held up once it was cooked. While the Cavendish became incredibly soft as it cooked in the caramelizing sauce, the Gros Michel’s firmer texture fared much better. The bananas Foster made with the Gros Michel did retain that slight candy flavor, but it was also chewier, creamier, and, I thought, a better iteration of the dish overall.

The next dessert on my list was banana pudding, another classic that predates the banana industry’s switch to the Cavendish. I made two batches—again, one with the Gros Michel and another with the Cavendish for comparison—in its classic layer style, alternating between a layer of vanilla wafer cookies, a layer of sliced bananas, and a layer of vanilla pudding. After they rested in the fridge for 24 hours, I opened the wide-mouth canning jars I’d assembled the pudding in and immediately noticed a difference in the way the two puddings smelled. 

The banana pudding made with today’s Cavendish smelled pleasantly sweet with a faint banana aroma, and had a delicate banana flavor to match. Upon opening the Gros Michel banana pudding, I noticed a much more candy-banana aroma. The Gros Michel pudding tasted much more intensely of banana, was noticeably richer, and ultimately yielded a pudding that tasted strikingly like banana Runts. Tasting this brighter iteration of pudding imbued with the Gros Michel’s flavor almost made me chuckle. It took me back to childhood Halloweens, or those coin-operated machines in the mall in the 1990s—banana candies supercharged with a sticky-sweet flavor that begged me to eat just one more bite. 

It became clear to me why the Gros Michel was the first choice banana for importation: It’s just an all-around better banana.

“I like the flavor of the Gros Michel more,” said Rane Roatta, co-owner of Miami Fruit. As someone who grows his own stock of Gros Michel bananas, Roatta has the privilege of enjoying the leftovers from each harvest. Eating the Gros Michel as his default banana has given Roatta an exceedingly rare insight into how it compares with the Cavendish, which remains the only yellow banana the vast majority of us can regularly eat.

“I think the Gros Michel has a little bit more of a floral sweetness,” Roatta added. “It’s got that candy banana flavor, which to me is a little bit more of a tip-of-the-tongue flavor. The Cavendish tends to be a little bit softer, a little more airy, whereas the Gros Michel is a little bit firmer. But they’re very close. Most people, if they were rushed, they wouldn’t think twice about the difference. But if you’re sitting there thinking about it, you can definitely taste a difference.”

The Cavendish steps in

So why did we ever let this candy-like variety fall to the wayside? It’s all rooted in a sinister plot of American corporations exploiting the people of South America for profit while keeping up with our demand for this lovely banana. Banana corporations, including Chiquita and Dole, grew the Gros Michel banana on the same land year after year using a practice called monocropping. These agricultural practices are unsustainably exhaustive and often strip soil of the nutrients required to continuously grow food in it. As major landowners in banana-growing regions, these produce corporations held massive influence over the people and institutions of these countries while desolating their land. In 1954, the United Fruit Company (which became Chiquita in 1984) even instigated an overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government.

“United Fruit Company owned tons and tons of land—they were the largest landowner in Guatemala,” said Danielle Jacques, a PhD student at Brandeis University whose work has often centered on food history and ethical consumption. “They would plant wide, massive swaths of land in this single commodity. It was very intensive and very extractive, and it would basically wipe out the soil nutrients in that area. And their solution to that problem was always to buy more land and to just leave that area fallow.”

In response to the banana industry’s unsustainable agricultural practices which were ravaging Guatemala’s farmland, then president Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán issued Decree 900 in 1952, which reallocated this abandoned, arable land back to the people of Guatemala. In response, United Fruit Company lobbied the United States federal government to protect their financial interests. The federal government did so through a Red Scare propaganda smear campaign against Guatemala’s president. 

The American government supported the coup d’état against Guatemala’s government in 1954, and United Fruit Company retained the land which was slated to be returned to the Guatemalan people. The incident is emblematic of the term “banana republic,” to refer to a country that’s dependent on a single commodity as the lifeblood of its economy, which includes the importance of banana exportation in Costa Rica and Honduras today. The overthrow of the Guatemalan government and the political instability it created ultimately resulted in the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted until 1996.

The banana plantations United Fruit Company sought to protect still exist today, and now monocrop the Cavendish, which you can find on grocery shelves everywhere in the US. Aside from how devastating banana monocropping is to soil fertility, and how the practice results in the need for further nutrient extraction from new soil or the habitual application of artificial fertilizers, monocropping bananas is bad for their gene pool. 

Monocropping is the very reason we can seldom enjoy Gros Michel bananas, because yellow bananas on the mass market—in the case of both the Gros Michel and the Cavendish—are all genetically identical. Both the Gros Michel and Cavendish bananas have sterile seeds, so new crops are propagated from preexisting banana trees through cuttings, meaning they are all clones. Because they’re genetically identical, all it takes to destroy the entire crop is one threat that evolves to destroy one banana tree. Since they’re all identical down to their DNA, once that threat has figured out how to infect one tree, it can infect them all. The close proximity of genetically identical banana trees on these monocropping plantations makes it easy for that threat to rapidly infect the entire crop.

“It’s more vulnerable to the killing disease that comes along [during] a plague,” Karp added. “[It’s] an epidemic that’s much more likely to destroy the industry.”

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—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.

Ultimately, the move away from the Gros Michel only bought the banana industry another three quarters of a century. The Cavendish is now becoming susceptible to a variety of the same disease that wiped out the Gros Michel. Although this variety of Panama disease, Tropical Race 4 (TR4), is once again threatening the globally imported yellow banana supply, history may not be doomed to repeat itself entirely. Those looking to save the Cavendish have already begun research to do so, including genetically modifying a new Cavendish cultivar to be resistant to the pathogen.

As a scholar focused on ethical consumption, Jacques suggests that technological innovation is a very American solution to the problem. Instead of changing our behaviors as capitalists fixated on short-term profits or consumers who expect genetic consistency from a single product within our food supply, we, as Americans, expect technology to solve the problems caused by our mass consumption.

“If we forget that this has already happened before, then maybe we have hope and maybe all of these start-ups can get funding for their new technology that’s going to save the banana and we can make money off of this idea of the need to innovate to save the banana—that’s like a machine that seems to be driving itself kind of on its own,” Jacques said. “Why not plant a different banana variety? Or why not let the people who live there decide what happens to that land?”

What will the bananas of the future look and taste like?

The future of identical yellow bananas looks dire, at least if it remains on the same track that multinational corporations have conditioned us to keep it on. 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. A better future for bananas, and perhaps agriculture generally, is to move away from the century-old business model of monocropped plantations which have again found themselves at the potential brink of collapse.

Beyond the Cavendish and the Gros Michel, there’s a whole world of bananas out there. In South America, red bananas are used frequently. In the Philippines, and elsewhere throughout Southeast Asia, the Latundan banana is a favorite. And, of course, many Americans are familiar with plantains (which are a type of banana), a staple of savory dishes throughout South America and the Caribbean.

In an ideal world, numerous small-scale farms, like Roatta’s at Miami Fruit, would be the backbone of the mass market banana supply and grow not one variety, but dozens. Other companies selling several banana varieties include Melissa’s Produce and Tropical Fruit Box. 

“I think you could have lots of success with new varieties, and I think people want it,” Roatta said. “Maybe not at a Walmart, but who knows. I think the demand is there and it’s ready to grow. It won’t be overnight, but I think people should invest into starting that.”

Instead of one mass-market yellow banana for every purpose, why don’t we grow and seek out different bananas for different applications like we’ve already done with apples? This one-banana-fits-every-purpose attitude isn’t just environmentally destructive, but we’re probably missing out on some exciting and delicious ways to make better banana bread, sweeter banana pudding, and creamier banana cream pie.