The bananas in your supermarket and that you eat for breakfast are facing functional extinction due to the disease Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB), caused by a fungal pathogen called Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense (Foc) tropical race 4 (TR4).
My understanding is they store well and consumers are used to them. There are definitely many other varieties available in local markets in tropical areas, some of which are better tasting IMO. But it’s just one of those things about global commodity trade that they want them all to be identical.
Consumers adapt to observable diversification if the product is superior and significantly different. They are almost totally ignorant if the differences are small and the product is similar. That’s not the reason.
The issue is that most of the banana production is handled by very few companies. Changing varieties complicates their internal processes, will cost them money, and they will not do it until forced to do so.
Good point. The banana industry is absolutely gargantuan (and pretty awful, but that’s an aside) so it may be that their logistics require the fruit to be a certain size, weight, shape, etc for efficiency.
also like, a lot of banana variants are so much more interesting and people go out of their way to get them, you ought to be able to charge more simply for providing something unique to people.
It probably comes down to the difficulty of of transport. We have a local fruit in the Eastern US, the Pawpaw. It’s a fantastic fruit and has a history of cultivation in the area. But, it does not transport well and has to be eaten pretty quickly after they ripen. So, it’s not a wide commercial success.
and the convenient bit is that it would all be true, because most people in the west have at most experienced 3 species of banana in their lives.
also bananas are honestly really fucking cheap in comparison with other fruits, i’d happily pay another dollar per kg for some more interesting bananas.
My understanding is they store well and consumers are used to them. There are definitely many other varieties available in local markets in tropical areas, some of which are better tasting IMO. But it’s just one of those things about global commodity trade that they want them all to be identical.
Consumers adapt to observable diversification if the product is superior and significantly different. They are almost totally ignorant if the differences are small and the product is similar. That’s not the reason.
The issue is that most of the banana production is handled by very few companies. Changing varieties complicates their internal processes, will cost them money, and they will not do it until forced to do so.
Good point. The banana industry is absolutely gargantuan (and pretty awful, but that’s an aside) so it may be that their logistics require the fruit to be a certain size, weight, shape, etc for efficiency.
also like, a lot of banana variants are so much more interesting and people go out of their way to get them, you ought to be able to charge more simply for providing something unique to people.
It probably comes down to the difficulty of of transport. We have a local fruit in the Eastern US, the Pawpaw. It’s a fantastic fruit and has a history of cultivation in the area. But, it does not transport well and has to be eaten pretty quickly after they ripen. So, it’s not a wide commercial success.
Label it new, special, and exotic, and people will buy it. Marketing is a hell of a drug.
and the convenient bit is that it would all be true, because most people in the west have at most experienced 3 species of banana in their lives.
also bananas are honestly really fucking cheap in comparison with other fruits, i’d happily pay another dollar per kg for some more interesting bananas.