You may have heard before that the bananas we know and love are all man-made, as we’ve bred seeds out of them, but before that we ate a different type of banana altogether! Until the 1950’s the main variety exported to the United States was the Gros Michel banana. Since, it has been the Cavendish.
The Gros Michel banana was bred the same way that the Cavendish has been, meaning all of the bananas were genetically identical. Because of this, it was easy for a killer fungus to almost completely wipe the banana out in the 50’s.
These bananas are still around, and supposedly taste better than Cavendish bananas, but you would have to go to an expensive specialty store or venture to a country like the Congo to get one.
99% of all bananas sold in supermarkets are genetically identical members of the Cavendish variety, and is the best-selling item for Wal-Mart. Although the Cavendish banana is essentially the only banana eaten in the United States, there are actually thousands of varieties of wild bananas.
