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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

Other, and my favorite, example -- bananas

Because the plants are reproduced asexually by cloning, exactly what you would expect happened, and a disease wiped out the monoculture fields (Gros Michel variety) of the early 1900s in the 50s and 60s.

Which we then replanted in purportedly less flavorful Cavendish, which was resistant to the then-dominant fungus.

Cue the new Panama fungal disease (Tropical Race 4) that Cavendishes are susceptible to, and we'll see what the future holds...

Maybe in 2085, grandparents will be waxing poetic about how they used to be able to get bananas everywhere cheaply.

It's fascinating to think that such a staple ("a banana") is completely different from the one people ate 60 years ago. And that they largely didn't exist in the United States grocery system 60 years before that.

Ref: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11320900/banana-rise

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> It's fascinating to think that such a staple ("a banana") is completely different from the one people ate 60 years ago.

The most interesting one to me is that US "bacon" and UK "bacon" are completely different things. But because of cultural crossover they get used for the same dishes, and people often don't realise the recipe they're working from was talking about something else.

They’re not completely different things. They’re both cured, and they both taste like bacon. Some companies “smoke” their bacon, or add various other flavors, in the US.

Smoked bacon is a thing in the UK too. Every store has both smoked and unsmoked back and streaky bacon.

But never having dealt with the raw product, only tasting the dried-to-a-crisp offering of every American eatery (from diner to five star hotel) I don't know whether it's the product or the preparation that's at fault

I'm just a little bit older than the US bacon craze, which was born out of unsold pork bellies, themselves a consequence of the late 1980s "Pork: the other white meat" campaign (itself a response to healthier, leaner chicken's rise). There's no way to produce a loin without a belly, etc.

So ironically, the US turned to more UK-like pork cuts in the 1980s, and then advertising turned it back to full-fat pork belly bacon in the 90s!

https://web.archive.org/web/20141006135510/http://www.busine...

i kind of wish i had experienced grocery shopping back when all the weird cuts were cheap.

these days, if anything what I would've considered off cuts growing up (wings, oxtail) are now more expensive than other parts in my area. I saw oxtails for $20 a pound the other day.

agreed, i remember being able to get monster tri-tip cuts any store for a total steal

They were cheap off cuts because almost no one wanted them. Oxtails got popularized by celebrity chefs so theres a lot more demand than the supply can handle now.

Here in SoCal there’s such a large population of immigrants that use neck bones and chicken feet for stock that even those cuts have risen in price relative to the rest of the country. It’s gotten to the point where rib eye roasts and new york steaks are only a dollar or two a pound more expensive than meat for stock at my local halal market.

Damn. What's the food equivalent of the urban legend about firing blanks in the air to keep the rent down?

The other way of looking at that is that cheap weird cut meat prices were a consequence of inefficient meat allocation (supply of those ending up at retail grocery where there wasn't demand).

So, ignoring the behind the scene details and holding cattle price constant, cheap weird cuts made well-known cuts more expensive (all cuts having to sum to price of cow).

I believe the behind the scenes logistics system has gotten better at sending different parts of the cow to different places (e.g. restaurant, commercial packaged, etc) where there is demand.

Case in point: most retail grocery doesn't do full butchering anymore, as it's been centralized upstream.

The difference is in the defaults, not the product. There are two distinct cuts of pork used for bacon: belly and loin. In the US, belly is the default ‘bacon’, and to get bacon made from pork loin you need to look for ‘Canadian bacon’ (but that will have the fat all trimmed off) or ‘Irish bacon’, or you might find ‘back bacon’ in a butcher or deli counter. In the UK the default ‘bacon’ is back bacon, made from the loin. If you want belly meat you need to look for ‘streaky bacon’.

Weirdly I think this is a case where US FDA regulations are oddly strict about what can be sold as ‘bacon’ and how it has to be packaged (those weird little fat windows in the cardboard) which prevents back bacon being offered as a normal product.

An anecdotal fact: the bananas I was buying at a market in Thailand when I visited the country tasted so much different (and for me, better) than the bananas I buy in an American supermarket, I am not sure I'd know it's a variant of the same plant if I did not see them.

Probably a Lady Finger banana, they're great

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