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> I should be amazed they exist at all. Exactly this. Go back a century and the idea of eating exotic fruits like these was the only available to the wealthies
by VBprogrammer 5y ago
> I should be amazed they exist at all.
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.
- gumby 5y ago> It's a shame in a way that bananas and the like have become ubiquitous… 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.
- hedora 5y agoBananas went (commercially) extinct decades ago. The things sold in stores today are a different fruit.
- wyclif 5y agoYou can still get the smaller, wilder variety in other places in the world. For instance, the Philippines.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoI remember walking into a small village store in Costa Rica to be confronted by about 10 named varieties of bananas, and noticing in the core a box just marked "apple". It was a cool inversion of the usual pattern in the US (and Europe).
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoEvery SE Asian country will have a few types of bananas available locally. Even Australia is jumping on the band wagon and I can get a couple more varieties now. I can even get plantains regularly. But we’re talking about mangoes and bananas and pineapples and calling those “tropical fruit” when there’s so many fruits in the tropics.
- max-ibel 5y agoApple bananas in Hawaii are delicious and available at the local Costco. 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.
- malleefowl 5y agoMiami Fruit grows then and will ship: https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order. I’ve never tried it though
- creamynebula 5y agoWe have quite a few varieties regularly available in every corner store here in Brazil, they all taste quite good if you wait for them to ripe
- inglor_cz 5y agoBananas were actually already sold fairly widely in the US in 1922. United Fruit Company et al. imported them by the boatload. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes!_We_Have_No_Bananas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes!_We_Have_No_Bananas
- gumby 5y ago> United Fruit Company et al. imported them by the boatload. …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.
- hourislate 5y ago>Go back a century and the idea of eating exotic fruits like these was the only available to the wealthiest. My father told me he was 27 years old when he ate his first banana. This was in Canada in 1950.
- gumby 5y agoA few weeks after the fall of the Wall in Germany we were in the grocery store in western Niedersachsen (just a few km from the wall) and encountered a woman from the East. She asked my wife what the names of several fruits and vegetables were. For a couple of months after the wall came down it was impossible to find bananas. Germans love bananas!
- antoniuschan99 5y agoI remember watching a documentary on the Titanic movie and they said oranges were considered luxury only the rich could afford
- aimor 5y agoEven today we still get an orange in the toe of each Christmas stocking.