Have you ever thought you should have been born in a different decade? We can all agree, the 90s were fun, but maybe you prefer the fashion of the 80s or the music of the 60s? We understand where you’re coming from, because we just found out that we might have favored the bananas of the 1950s. If you’re scratching your head at this statement, please allow us to explain.
You know how banana-flavored candy doesn’t actually taste like real bananas? It turns out there’s a very unexpected reason for that, and it has to do with the variety of bananas people used to eat versus the kind we eat today. Eater conquered the question of why banana-flavored candy tastes the way it does in the very first episode its new video series “Snack Break.”
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According to “Snack Break,” a different variety of banana existed before the 1960s. It was called the Gros Michel, and it was unfortunately wiped out by a fungal pathogen called Panama Disease. The bananas we eat today are called Cavendish, and they are resistant to the disease that wiped out the Gros Michel. These two varieties taste different, which is why our candy doesn’t taste like the bananas we eat now.
You see, the Gros Michel variety actually had that artificial taste we associate with banana-flavored candy, and the Gros Michel is the variety that banana candy was flavored after. Though when we moved to eating seedless Cavendish banana no one changed the banana candy flavor profile to match the new bananas. So, for those of us who love nothing more than a banana Popsicle on a hot day, if we had lived way back when, we could have just put popped a regular banana in the freezer for our favorite summertime treat. What a pleasant thought.