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Comment by cfontes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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