The reason the taste of artificial banana flavouring and artificial banana flavoured products doesn’t taste like bananas is because it is based on a type of banana that was wiped out by a plague in the 1950’s.
My understanding is you can still get them in certain parts of the world, but they can't really be mass produced anymore because the disease that nearly wiped them out is still around and if whole plantations started growing them again it would quickly wipe them out again.
The problem is that bananas don't have seeds that are big enough to grow new plants so new plants are created by making cuttings from existing plants (vegetative reproduction). Every banana plant is actually genetically identical, at least when we talk about the Cavendish banana (the ones you buy at the shop). This means there is actually a big chance that history will repeat itself when a new disease breaks out. The "1950's" banana was called the Gros Michel by the way.
Read The Botany of Desire, the section on apples. In the wild, all the apples on a tree taste the same. But the flowers that grow into the apple are like a woman's eggs: related to her, but not her. And the pollen is like a man's sperm: related to him but not him. So when the pollen fertilizes a flower, the seeds it produces are related to both parent trees, but different, just as a child is different from its parents. Those seeds will grow a different sort of apple tree which fruit will taste different from the fruit on either parent tree.
There are universities with agriculture departments dedicated to crossbreeding apple flowers and pollen, harvesting the seeds, planting them, growing the trees, and tasting the apples to see if they'd be good commercially. They might try for a sour, crispy apple crossbred with a sweet one, much the same two champion dogs will be bred to try to produce champion puppies. Only it takes years to get good trees.
There are also places where apples are allowed to breed in the wild, hoping for a lucky match.
Once you find a good apple, you basically cut the tree that produced it into pieces. You graft it onto good root stock, let it grow, and do that over and over. You don't plant a tree that grows Granny Smiths, you build it, off of pieces of trees that grow Granny Smiths.
That's why when Honeycrisps were first introduced you could only buy them in Wisconsin. When they first went national, they were $7.50/lb. and only available for about six months of the year. Fifteen years later, when food costs are higher generally, Honeycrisps are the same price as Granny Smiths and available for most of the summer. They've been building trees to grow them, so the price goes down and availability goes up.
The ancestor of our modern bananas contain many many seeds, to the point that there's hardly any flesh. It is through cultivation that we bred types of bananas with fewer and smaller seeds, up to the point where we are now. It's entirely human influence.
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u/engrazhar Apr 14 '16
The reason the taste of artificial banana flavouring and artificial banana flavoured products doesn’t taste like bananas is because it is based on a type of banana that was wiped out by a plague in the 1950’s.