I've been vegetarian for almost three years now, and the banana has become even more important to me than when I used to slice them up as a kid and put them in my Corn Flakes back in Brooklyn (yeah, no 5-grain, fair-trade, grown by native peoples cereals when I was a kid!).
Now, I live in East Java, Indonesia, and I eat the bananas right outside, which are a plantain. I am amazed out how quickly the plant regrows and produces fruit. I never knew they were a berry.
Indonesian bananas just gained tariff-free import to Japan last year to compete with the likes of Dole, Chiquita, and others. Fortunately, Indonesia has many varieties still being grown in case the TR-4 fungus hits harder than it already has. The Philippines has lost many plantations.
I personally prefer the smaller, less popular banana here for its taste. Maybe all those years of eating Cavendish bananas wore out my taste buds.
I do think the GMO crowd will step in, since obviously they can't wait to hybridize a local banana to scale up production to meet demand.
> I personally prefer the smaller, less popular banana here for its taste.
Most people do.
The cavendish is not popular because it's good[0], it's popular because it's export-resilient: it supports green-picking and ethylene-ripening well, it handles limited refrigeration (13.5~15C) for long periods of time, it has good shelf life after artificial ripening and it looks pretty good all along (as far as western consumers are concerned anyway). A cavendish might see to two months between picking and consumption.
[0] most people I know of who have eaten other cultivars find cavendish bland and uninteresting, one of my colleagues compared it to an oatmeal sausage
I live in Sweden at the moment, in a work environment with many nationalities. You remind me of how all colleagues from countries around the Mediterranean Sea agree that the vegetables and fruit are pretty bland over here, and that the selection is pretty small as well. The reason for that is exactly what you said: the choices are limited by export-resilience.
Now, I live in East Java, Indonesia, and I eat the bananas right outside, which are a plantain. I am amazed out how quickly the plant regrows and produces fruit. I never knew they were a berry.
Indonesian bananas just gained tariff-free import to Japan last year to compete with the likes of Dole, Chiquita, and others. Fortunately, Indonesia has many varieties still being grown in case the TR-4 fungus hits harder than it already has. The Philippines has lost many plantations.
I personally prefer the smaller, less popular banana here for its taste. Maybe all those years of eating Cavendish bananas wore out my taste buds.
I do think the GMO crowd will step in, since obviously they can't wait to hybridize a local banana to scale up production to meet demand.