I’m happy to be able to eat a banana; merely sorry that the ubiquitous one is such a boring variety.
The consequences of the industrial monocrop banana will be solved soon one way or another: the cavendish is under attack and either it will be replaced or all bananas will go extinct. I suppose Hegel would have appreciated this example.
But we’re talking about mangoes and bananas and pineapples and calling those “tropical fruit” when there’s so many fruits in the tropics.
As you say, the “gros michel” cultivar is mostly dead commercially, although there are attempts to get a variant resistant to fungal disease.
I’d like to taste a Gros Michel some day.
My father told me he was 27 years old when he ate his first banana. This was in Canada in 1950.
For a couple of months after the wall came down it was impossible to find bananas. Germans love bananas!
In fact, there was a crisis of supply caused by the Panama disease infesting the plantations, and people were very unhappy with that, because they got so used to the fruit.
…assisted by the United States Marines, and in fact the origin of the term “Banana Republic”.
I was shocked by the tastelessness of the company name when the Banana Republic clothing chain opened up.
Exactly this. Go back a century and the idea of eating exotic fruits like these was the only available to the wealthiest.
It's a shame in a way that bananas and the like have become ubiquitous, to the detriment of fruits which were locally available.