Bananas Don't Taste Like They Used To. Here's Why
epicurious.com
epicurious.com
It's like a fairy tale witch cursed us all for our greed: you will have any food you like any time you like it, but it will taste bland and boring and you will long for a taste you have never known.
That's why people get so protective of their food culture, even their food habits (like meat-eaters getting up in arms when they hear from vegans). It's because if we leave food completely at the hands of big food, we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving and just good enough to eat to keep us from all going mad.
That's not a problem with "big food" - the food is far too nutritious and abundant. Sugary cereals for children and big macs can't be described at "just keeping us from starving".
We want restricted (but complete) nutrition that is just enough to keep us from starving, so that we maintain our size and don't end up with an energy abundance that causes processes like fat storage and inflammation to run wild.
Even outside "big food", the virtue of trying to maximize "tasty" means that our home cooking is also driven by food addiction - "big food"'s laser focus on this makes them much more effective in making addictive foods at the lowest cost, in turn making the healthier options seem "bland".
Our bodies and food reward systems are not geared for this abundance of concentrated nutrition.
It's only "good" if the tastier versions of food don't come with even more nutrition that we cannot handle. Carrots in their natural form are for example not at all as large, sweet and nutritious as the orange things we have now. They were bitter and bland.
Nutrition as you define it seems to be purely calories. Another definition would be complete micronutrient profile.
Taste as you define it seems to be fat, sugar, salt. Another definition would be complexity of taste.
Big food currently optimizes for the first definitions of above which is bad for long term health. Second definitions of above would be better for long term health.
No, your assumption of my definition of “tasty” is not right. Did you like the taste? Then it is tasty. Eating tasty foods is pleasurable, and therefore addictive. And what home cook wouldn’t try to make their food more tasty?
Fats, sugars and salts are shortcuts to maximizing primitive tastiness because “tasty” is meant to drive a search for nutrients and a guidance away from dangerous foods (especially salt giving how rare it can be - ever seen what animals do to get to a salt lick?), but that’s all.
Complexity is itself not tastiness. If a “complex” taste does not make you want to eat more, I’d argue that the food was not at all tasty, but just an interesting experience. Like seeing an art piece that was not beautiful and certainly not something you’d ever consider buying, but still worth having a look at once on a special day.
The focus on too much is important. No food has everything you need (other than engineered Soylent-like foods), and we rely on composing a healthy diet by using foods whose profiles augment each other. The weaker the nutrition of a food item, the more room you have to augment your diet to obtain the needed balance. If you are already close to any limit, your options for augmentation to cover the remaining needs without reaching an excess is heavily reduced. If a single food item already exceeds any limit, there is no way to construct a healthy diet with it.
If your way of dealing with disagreement is to call opposing views childish, then it is safe to say that you are not mature enough to hold a discussion on the matter.
I am a consumer and do not expect year-round availability of fruit and vegetables.
There are plenty of examples of produce bred for color, size, and shelf-life over flavor (e.g. tomatoes). In general, the fruits and vegetables we have today are fantastically more delicious and edible than long ago. Watermelon might be the best example of this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-pa...
That's not what the ongoing obesity epidemic shows.
They were grown in the middle of England in the largest greenhouse in the world (heated by 8 coal fired furnaces requiring so much fuel that a small railway was installed). It sat a few minutes walk from a house (one of 8 the Duke inherited), literally covered in gold so it would look nice during sunsets.
The bananas won a horticultural prize in London and were then shipped off around the world - setting the scene for where the article picks up.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-English-name-for-the-Karpo...
commonly available in South India.
then there is the hill banana, also small like the one above. grows in the Palani Hills in Western Tamil Nadu, at least. maybe in other hilly places too. it may be the same as the above one. not sure.
one of the best banana varieties for flavour, not just sweetness, is the nendran or nendrapazham, grown in Kerala, and maybe in western Tamilnadu.
it's slightly larger than, and looks different from, the common banana. the outer surface is somewhat ridged, like a ridge gourd.
it can be eaten either raw or cooked. very different taste from the common banana.
considered a delicacy.
https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/Nendran_Bananas_23405.p...
They tasted very much better than my usual rather tasteless supermarket-bought bananas. I'm going to try the exercise again tomorrow to check whether this was a one-off or not.
After reading the article, I'm going to check with the grower whether or not these were Cavendish bananas which are the norm around this banana-growing area, or something else.
Those bananas were dwarf Cavendish. And the farmer said " .. and we don't treat them with (ethylene) gas."
If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.
Here in the tropics fruit ripens very quickly (chemical reactions proceed faster with increased temperature). I try to slow that down by keeping the stuff cold in the fridge. (But the fridge traps the EtO anyway!)
good to know. I guess that explains why the traditional Indian method works.
>If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.
but why would you want to do that? trap that, I mean? i would have thought you would want to use a fan to blow away the naturally occurring ethylene gas, so that it does not cause the fruit to ripen fast / further.
a few minutes later:
I just checked it. they are different.
Sometimes you don't want to have to wait days for a fruit to ripen, that's why it's faster to use the plastic bag trick.
"you can never leave" :)
Why are you reaching so far into the "why" and assigning those users very strange and hurtful characteristics? "Insane", "retards", "haters", "no money and no love in their life". Are you sure the reasons can't be simpler? What do the HN guidelines say on the topic?
PS: I don't have the ability to downvote anything in case you think I'm your mortal enemy / hater / retard.
it's just that it seems to me that is senseless of these people to downvote comments for what seems like no good reason at all. and like I said somewhere else here recently, why can't they make a reply comment, saying what they think is wrong with my comment, if they disagree - as you just did. I can't tell, by a downvote, whether they just disapprove, or actually disagree. and if they disagree, it would be helpful if they said why. downvoting seems like the lazy option in the case of disagreement.
but yes, you really cannot change people. either they have some good reason for doing it, which I don't understand, or they just are that way.
anyway I am getting tired of doing it, so maybe I'll take your advice and just ignore it from now on.
thanks for your feedback.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/green-bananas-good-or-b...
I wonder how it is that we keep using this heirloom banana flavoring even after everyone's assumptions about what a proper banana tastes like changed.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-most-interesting-fruit-...
> This is precisely what happened in the early to mid-20th century. Panama disease, a wilt-causing fungus, evolved to attack one Gros Michel banana tree. It was then able to infect all the Gros Michel banana trees which were planted in close quarters with one another on these massive banana plantations. Only by switching the crop to a new banana that American consumers would like [-Cavendish] —one that was similar to the Gros Michel in color and shape, but was genetically distinct from it—could the banana industry save itself from collapsing. In the process, though, we lost the better banana.
I'm guessing that's because tomatoes are fruit and fruit always tastes better when it's in season. For instance, I wonder if I've ever known the true taste of ripe mango. I have eaten plenty of mangoes, but I only ever eat them in the UK, where they're imported. I suspect that they taste very differently (as in much better) if you pick them from a tree in the right season. I bet South-East Asians in the UK must turn their noses up to the local mango supply, like I do with, well, most veg really.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali
i don't kid. it's huge, and mainly empty. I first read about it in an English children's novel about Arabia, as a kid.