The Myth of Artificial Banana Flavor
(More info about fake banana flavoring than anyone ever cared to learn.)
If there’s one thing on the internet that everyone seems to love, it’s sharing random facts with other people. I’m sure almost everyone these days has a handful of little fun facts that they’ve learned over the years, that they’ll happily parrot out to anyone who might even be slightly interested in hearing them. Of course, this being the internet, it’s also unfortunately true that many of these fun little “facts” that get shared around on your favorite social media sites are often misleading, inaccurate, or even just outright false. While I could talk at length about all kinds of different misconceptions that are frequently spread across the internet, today my main focus is a specific often repeated story about the history of the humble banana, as well as the artificial flavoring that’s allegedly supposed to taste like it.
Now, I’m sure most people online these days have heard the story of why artificial banana flavoring doesn’t taste like actual bananas, but I’ll summarize for anyone who may have avoided that particular little factoid. The story goes that back when artificial banana flavoring was first formulated, the variety of banana typically found in stores around the world was actually different from what we see nowadays. The original mass-market banana was a cultivar known as the “gros michel” or “big mike” banana, but as the story goes the big mike banana was struck by a plague and went extinct in the 1950s. With the big mike bananas gone, a different, more disease resistant variety called the “cavendish” banana started to be grown in its place. So, because cavendish bananas taste different from big mike bananas, the artificial banana flavor everyone knows basically tastes like a fruit we no longer have access to.
While this version of the story is often passed around the internet as truth, it’s actually got quite a lot of flaws. First off, while it is true that the big mike banana crop was stricken by a fungal blight in the 1950s, that banana variety didn’t actually go extinct. You can still buy big mike bananas today if you know where to look for them, the blight just prevents them from being economically viable to grow and sell at an international scale. The biggest flaw with this tale, however, is the idea that artificial banana flavoring doesn’t taste like bananas because it’s modeled after a different type of banana than we typically eat in the present day. While big mike and cavendish bananas do have their differences, they are both still varieties of the same species, and the cavendish banana was specifically picked to replace the big mike bananas in part because it was one of the most similar varieties to it. While big mike bananas are supposed to be slightly sweeter than cavendish on average and have a creamier texture, the flavor profiles of the two bananas are overall still largely the same.
So, if the two banana varieties aren’t actually that different, then why does artificial banana flavoring taste so little like actual bananas? The real answer, of course, is the same as why artificial grape, orange, green apple or any other number of artificial fruit flavors don’t really taste like the fruits they’re supposedly based on; they’re artificial. Try as they might, it’s basically impossible for food scientists to create artificial flavorings that 100% match the taste of natural fruits and other foods. A real banana contains dozens or even hundreds of different organic compounds in varying amounts that all work together to produce their flavor. By comparison, artificial banana flavoring is produced mainly using a single compound, sometimes mixed with one or two others. So while that bag of circus peanuts you bought at your local Walmart may not taste like some magical extinct variety of banana, don’t let that fact stop you from enjoying them.