- Have you ever wondered why banana flavoring
and candy or medicine tastes nothing like an actual banana?
This blew my mind when I found out.
So in the 1800s
when bananas were first being introduced to America
there were a handful of varieties
but one became super popular called the Gros Michel.
And that's because it made a ton
of fruit and was easy to ship all around the world.
And that is what artificial banana flavor
was based off of.
But the problem was decades later in the 1950s
a fungal disease basically destroyed that entire species.
And so as a result, this guy, the Cavendish became popular
because it was resistant to that fungal disease.
So every single time you taste banana flavoring,
you're actually tasting a banana of the past.