WHY BANANAS ARE MUTANTS

You must be bananas to think that bananas are natural. The yellow Cavendish became ubiquitous only because the Gros Michel, the world’s most widely grown banana then, was wiped out in the 1950s by a fungal infection called the Panama disease. Apparently, the Gros Michel had a richer and sweeter taste than the Cavendish, so even today, synthetic banana flavour tastes like the Gros Michel, not the monotonously one-dimensional Cavendish. The banana plant also has an edible stem, but it’s a fake stem made up of tightly packed leaves that simply unfurl towards the top. When you put one in a fridge, the lower temperature causes cell walls to rupture, leaking digestive enzymes that hasten the ripening process and turn the banana black in a very short time.