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Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

I managed to get a banana cultivar called an ice cream banana [1] at a farmer's market in Oahu, Hawaii. It was the best banana I've ever had. I wish there was more of a willingness to explore selling a wider variety of bananas. We have 5-10 kinds of apples in my local grocery store in New York and the same is true for the other US states I've lived (including Oklahoma).

Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for sale?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana

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> Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for sale?

There was an interesting Forbes piece I read last night that answers this question:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavage/2018/01/04/yes-we-...

TL;DR: because most varieties of bananas in nature are ugly as hell and have seeds; the banana people want must not be like them, and it must also ship efficiently and have good shelf life; only two cultivars managed to hit all of the requirements so far - Gros Michel, and - after it got eaten by disease - Cavendish, which is the one we eat today.

The article points out that the industry has been fully aware of the problems with monoculture for a very long time now, and they don't really have much options to fix it. The text blames modern anti-biotechnology/anti-GMO movements from taking away the one good option we had to solve this - genetic engineering.

> because most varieties of bananas in nature are ugly as hell and have seeds

I've had several different varieties besides the Cavendish; none of them were ugly or had seeds, and most of them tasted better than the Cavendish.

I suspect it's more about yield and where they can be grown and how well they ship (the others I've had were mostly in places close time here they were grown, though Manzanos sometimes show up in California markets as special items.) And the fact that the market is dominated by a couple corporate behemoths that don't really care to compete with themselves and would rather have two product lines (one organic, one not) than a larger number.

Many of those variants are related to the Cavendish or GM, and are not resistant to existing threats.

Those that are resistant, without seeds, with similar taste, often have thinner/weaker skins causing more spoilage/loss, lower shelf lives, are more expensive to harvest/store (grow in less dense groups) etc...

Those corporate behemoths would love to save money by not loosing good cropland to viruses that kill their crops, but the only solution to date that doesn't end up costing more elsewhere due to the issues mentioned above is GMO's and their potential to maintain those benefits while adding resistance (or apply those traits to other varieties that are already resistant).

the industry has been fully aware of the problems with monoculture for a very long time now, and they don't really have much options to fix it

That's hard to believe. Look at tomatoes. We don't need genetic engineering to fix tomatoes, we need a change in marketing & consumer demand. Tomatoes have been hyper-optimized for a small set of parameters, leading to little variety and bland flavor. Yet, if you look in the right places, you can find perfectly edible reasonably priced alternatives, proving the flavorless beefsteak is not the only marketable tomato.

There are, in Brazil you get at least 3 to 5 bananas in every single market.

Some are more sweet like "Prata" some are bigger like "Nanica", some are smaller like "Banana ouro" or one that smells somewhat like an apple called "banana maça".

There is also one for cooking "Banana da terra" used to make fish dishes mainly.

If you go to farmers there are even more.

It's probably a cultural thing, in the Netherlands you can find mainly 2 types, regular international one and the Cooking kind because of Asians mostly, which makes me really sad, Australia is like that as well.

"Caturra" and "nanica" are both types of Cavendish. They, as well as "prata" and "maçã" are all part of group AAA and are affected by the fungus.

Just having more types on the market doesn't help, you need types that resist the fungus.

A lot of American grocery stores also do a terrible job of simply naming the variety. For example, mangoes come in a wide variety & my local stores will often carry different ones. They are always labeled as "mango" though and never specify a variety. So it's Russian roulette on the taste & whether you will need to floss or not after eating it.

> It's probably a cultural thing

I think it got more to do with the fact that Bananas are a domestic fruit in Brazil but need to be imported to the US/Netherlands/Australia.

Importing is more cost efficient at scale, i.e. importing dozens of tons of the same type of banana should be more affordable than importing the same tonnage of a dozen different banana types.

By catering to one or two established tastes you also run less risk of being stuck with excess banana stocks of types that might end up not appealing to the local tastes, so people play it safe and just import the types which are known to sell well.

It's likely to be purely economics of scale at play. Bananas are not indigenous to Brazil, but the climate is ideal for them, so more varieties are available without complex and expensive shipping and handling logistics involved.

There are almost guaranteed others that are just hard to find, though as others have pointed out some are harder to ship. Go find grocery stores that caters to (West) African or Asian cuisine, and you'll at the very least almost certainly find plaintain varieties and possibly others.

But other than that, I expect it has a lot to do with what people expect a good banana to look like. E.g. Cavendish bananas tends to get removed from the shelves when they start to go brown/black, while plaintains are often still popular and sold until they've gotten much darker and look overripe and too soft for those of us used to Cavendish, for example. And we expect a certain consistency, and to not have to worry about e.g. deseed a banana - both expectations that'd be violated by a huge portion of the available varieties.

Carrots are in a similar position - there are huge amounts of varieties of all kinds of shapes and colors, yet the "right" look of a carrot is so ingrained that the few other varieties usually on offer tends to be sold almost as novelties.

Note that plantains are distinct from bananas; plantains are more like a vegetable that have to be cooked before consumption

They're not really biologically distinct. There are just some banana cultivars that taste good without cooking and some that taste better after cooking.

Not really true - as the other poster said, they are all part of a sort of species-complex. Some cultivars need to be cooked for hours, some for minutes, some are tasty without cooking.

The problem is that they don't ship well.

I was going to mention Hawaii too. There are at least 5 sweet varieties seen commonly in local stores and markets... and still more cooking bananas & plantains.

http://www.extento.hawaii.edu/kbase/crop/crops/i_banana.htm

Here in Washington state, I've found that small grocers focused on Vietnamese and Asian markets often carry a variety of bananas. They are amazing both in texture and taste.

you can get those at asian super markets in most cities.

They are ok, they kind of have a more of a 'berry' taste and the 'banana' taste is much weaker.

I know this won't solve your problem, but walk into any fruit market in Kenya and you'll have ten varieties (none of them "ugly" or "with seeds"). So I guess we poor westerns just get the shippable one.

Not only africa, also most likely all of Asia. This rather strange limitation seems to be a western issue.

Most of the grocery store apples are awful though.

And they've really pushed it in recent years (warehousing the apples for a long time, reducing the average quality). Or maybe I've gotten more picky. But some of the newer varieties, in season, are just delicious.

A disproportionate number of the apples in the grocery store have MacIntosh in their ancestry and are basically variants of them. There's not a wide variety of genetic diversity among eating apples, despite apples having a couple milennia of breeding history, a huge number of varieties (historical and current), and fairly diverse genetics. Consumers seem have a fairly narrow palette in what they consider to be a good eating apple.

> A disproportionate number of the apples in the grocery store have MacIntosh in their ancestry

Interesting! I love Macintosh apples having grown up on them from my mother who is from Vermont (She makes a mean Apple Pie with only those). Sadly, I can never seem to find them here in the Bay Area. My mother makes a large order shipped from Vermont every Fall.

All that to say, I'm surprised the apples that taste pretty poor to me are closely related to Macintosh.

That’s odd, I live in the Bay Area and all of the grocery stores in my town (big chains - safeway and lucky) carry Macs. I know this because they are my favorite, and the ONLY apple to use for cobbler, crisp, or pie.

I am growing Blue Java bananas at home. If you live somewhere bananas can survive winter[1] then they're nice plants to grow yourself.

1. Cold enough and the plant above ground will die but the roots (corm) survives and in spring the plant will grow back amazingly fast. Too cold and the corm will die too, and you're out of luck. The US South and Southwest is good, and of course tropical climates.

I am getting tired of reading "Death of a Cavendish" articles, which prophesy doom for "the banana", and hint at some mysterious past banana that's now gone - the Gros Michel.

Jut as you say - there are other bananas! I've had them! I've had them in the UK, usually from non-mainstream, international food shops. I've had them in Indonesia, New Caledonia and various other Far East/Oceania areas. I've had apple bananas, lady-fingers, Fe'i and more...

There seems to be this delusion that there's such a thing as 'a banana' in the west, so we get 'bananas'. We miss out on the really tasty varieties and we fret that the most generic might die out and then we'd have no bananas. There are loads of genetically diverse types, and what's more if it wasn't for the insane monoculture the spread of disease wouldn't be half as bad.

Even the same banana species can taste very different depending on the country.

In Europe, bananas are branded and consumers have a tendency to choose specific brands based on quality. In Australia, fruits in grocery shops are rarely branded and I found that bananas in Australia are usually not as good: they're just very sweet but kind of plain.

I've heard stories that in Australia, farmers export the best fruits overseas and keep the worst ones to sell locally. I guess it has something to do with the fact that Australian consumers aren't very picky. You have to go to a special farmer's market if you want something good.

You can easily buy other varieties in Latin America in grocery stores in the country side but they do not travel well and so that is where they remain.

I think a lot of that happens due to the length of time a fruit is ripe (and, specifically, tastes good) and how hardy it is to ship.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Planet Money episodes. We need a David Bedford for bananas.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/epis...

They sell the ice cream banana here in Seattle too. It's too sweet for me.

Where?

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