May 18, 2022 • 12 mins
In the Watermelon episode, Chuck and Josh stumbled into a bit of little-known history about why artificial banana flavor doesn’t taste like bananas. Turns out it does; it just tastes like a banana you’ve probably never eaten.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's
chuck where the banana splits and this is short stuff.
Let's go. I thought you were gonna say we're bananas
for banana flavoring. I should have I think we should
retake this whole thing. Frankly, no, no way, not not
by a million years years. Was better than mine. Uh,
(00:26):
this is a good episode. Hats off to you for
putting it together. Thank you, But the hats really come
off to a few a handful of astute listeners. Chuck,
because I had no idea about this until in our
watermelon episode. If you'll remember, you started talking about how
just far off like banana candy flavor is from actual
(00:50):
banana taste, and I was like, you're absolutely right, and
they just like they just missed the mark so badly.
But after we we talked about that, um, we didn't
e lies. We'd accidentally stumbled into kind of like a
overlooked history of at least flavor science, if not pop
culture that some of our listeners wrote in, say, guys, guys,
get this, that banana flavoring actually is really dead on
(01:15):
to a banana that we don't eat anymore. It was
created back at a time when there's this banana that's
not around any longer was popular. And that's why it
seems weird to us because it doesn't taste like bananas
we eat today. And I just started tearing at my
clothing and shaking my head left and right. I was like,
gott to get a short stuff out as fast as
possible about this delirium, said, and when you heard there
(01:37):
was an O B that's right, an O G B
that's right. Uh. And that banana, my friends, is called
is it Michelle m the gross Michelle g R O
S M I C H E L. That was a
banana grown in the mid of the beginning of the
mid nineteenth century by off he grow in Jamaica. And uh,
(02:02):
we would you know, Big Mike would be his name
here in the States. But it was gross Michelle. And
this stuff was great for sitting around the world because
it grew in little tight bunches. It was very thick skin,
it was very slow to ripen after he picked it off,
and so it was really good as a as a
shipping fruit until disaster struck in that right. Yeah, So
(02:24):
so I think in the eighteen seventies around then the
gross Michelle like became the dominant banana and that lasted
all the way. That's how it's right. That lasted all
the way until the nineteen fifties when something called a
Panama disease or banana wilt, which is a fungal disease
that attacks banana plants um and it's caused by a
(02:47):
fungus called Fusarium oxy spoor um form us. Specialist Cuban say,
and it aroused the dead or something. I look out
behind you, chuck um and Uh, this particular soil dwelling
fungus really munches down on banana crops. And so after
seventy years of market dominance, the gross Michelle went basically
(03:13):
extinct in less than a decade because this banana wilt
just took hold and spread through the banana crops like wildfire. Yeah,
which is a problem when you have a monoculture, when
you have all these identical essentially plants and you have
a fungus that attacks it, Uh, you're gonna have no
more bananas or any sort of monoculture. So, like you said,
(03:37):
within ten years it's gone went from the O B
to the NOBI And everyone said, we gotta get a
new banana. We invented the cavendish, and that's what we
eat today. It's another monoculture, so something else comes along
that's trouble. But the cavendish is resistant to Panama disease,
and so far, so good. We're the cabinash is doing
(04:00):
pretty well. Yes, but there they've identified a couple of diseases.
The cavendish is not um resistant too, and so if
those diseases ever took hold, we'd have the same problem
all over again. So the banana growing industry does not
learn lessons very well. And that cavendish is if you
are eating a banana today, basically anywhere in the world,
there's genuinely a chance that banana is a Cavendish, because
(04:26):
not only is the cavendish the most widely grown variety
that supplies the world's bananas, um the the cavendishes that
are grown are actually clones of one another. Because it's
really really hard to get a banana to get sexy
with another banana, so they use clones. They take rhizomes
from one plant plant that grow another plant, and so
(04:50):
those plants are clones of one another, meaning they're not
very genetically dissimilar, they're pretty much identical. And um, that
means that if you have a disease that can take
out one of those plants, it can take out all
those plants. And so the Cavendish, like you said, is
in the same position that the gross Michelle is. We've
just lucked out by not happening yet. That's right. So
(05:13):
the top banana is gone, second banana is now dominant,
and I think that's time for a break before I
think of another bad pun, and we'll be right back. Well,
now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want
to learn a thing or two from Josh can Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, alrighty, so now
(05:58):
we're at the part where we talk about banana candy
and everything from an Hour Later's I'm sorry now and
Laters always said an hour Laters when I was too
now and Laters, which is really that's a huge sea change.
And I think about it, yeah, because they're saying like,
have them start now, and you're gonna be chewing them
(06:19):
later still too, because they don't go away very fast
or runts or Nico wafers, any of that stuff. You've
probably eaten it and said, this really doesn't taste like
a banana, and like you mentioned the beginning, it is
because it doesn't taste like a cabinish. Apparently it does
taste like a gross Michelle. And there is a very
nuanced story to why. Yeah, because the gist of the story,
(06:41):
the legend as it goes, is that they created this
banana flavoring to to mimic the dominant banana at the time,
the gross Michelle. The gross Michelle went extinct, but this
banana flavoring carried on. And so to those of us
alive today who've never had a gross Michelle, it seems
weird and foreign. But it's not like the chemists like
(07:02):
extracted gross Michelle and then injected into the candy and
then that's where banana flavoring came from. It's, like you said,
the whole thing was a lot more nuanced than that.
And in fact, they developed this artificial banana flavor and
then tinkered with it to make it mimic the gross
Michelle um, which as we'll see, they apparently did pretty well. Yeah,
(07:22):
so there was believe it or not, there's a banana
flavoring researcher. I think just general researcher, but an author
named Nadia Rubinstein who did a lot of research on this,
on this story and trace the development of the banana
flavoring back to nineteen twelve by these New Jersey chemists,
the I guess the Fritz brothers. Sure, Fritcha. It's like
(07:49):
Fritz and mixed together scch. It's kind of a weird name.
But they said that Frish she Fris the Freshi brothers.
But they were from New Jersey, so they didn't take
any guff and they didn't didn't want anybody poking around
their banana synthesizing operation. But uh not. Eve Rubenstein found
(08:10):
out that they did isolate from real bananas and that
they were they had to have been gross Michelle because
that was the again, the top banana. Right, So you say, well,
then the story is true. They took gross Michelle essence
and put it into candies. Still not quite right, because
it gets a little more convoluted than that, because what
they extracted from the gross Michelle and identified as basically
(08:32):
banana essence is a chemical compound called amal ascetate. And
it's not just found in bananas, it's found in other
fruits and it's actually one of the other fruits that
it's really kind of predominant. It is pairs and um.
Rubinstein found from a research that depending on the company
you're buying from and the decade it was, uh amal
(08:55):
ascetate would be marketed in their catalogs either as banana
essence or pair essence, and that over the years it
eventually is just kind of evened out into a generic
fruity essence because it's it is. It depends a lot
on the power of suggestion and the nose or tongue
of the beholder what fruit evokes. Yeah, and this is
(09:16):
I think where it gets super cool because, uh, if
you live in the UK, you probably eat a little
more pear than banana, or at least historically or culturally,
that's sort of the deal. Then you might hear in
the United States, I think Americans eat like what like
a hundred and thirty bananas a or something like that.
That's everyone around the world. Yeah, but the UK is
(09:38):
big on their pears and pear flavor things. So if
you take the very same exact vial of that what's
it called again, amial ascetate, amial acetate, he's sticking under
the nose. First of all, you say, get that beer
pine out of your hands so you can smell something
for a change, And they say, all right, and you
put that vial under the nose of someone from the UK,
(09:59):
they'll say, tastes like pears. Put that same vile under
an American. First of all, you smack the the cheap
light beer out of the American's hand and you put
that under their nose, and they'll say it tastes like
a banana. And it's the same thing, right, It's the
(10:19):
same vial. It all depends on what you've been exposed to.
Remember we were talking about like like Gray candy having
banana flavor. If you would even be able to recognize
this banana flavor, like I was right in a really
roundabout way, which I was sure super love that kind
of thing, um, because you you you have to basically
(10:39):
tell people this is banana candy, this flavor, it's banana flavor. Um.
And the thing is, though, is they really did kind
of nail the taste of gross Michelle with this um
amial acetate. Because upon later inspection, food science and flavoring
science has gotten exponentially more sophisticated than it was back
(11:02):
in n when the Fritzie Brothers were working UM and
they found that that Gross Michelle bananas had more of
a related compound called iso amal acetate than the Cavendish does.
And UM that because of this kind of thicker concentration
of amal acetate in this this banana flavoring, it evokes
(11:25):
the Gross Michelle way more than it does the Cavendish.
And like you said, beyond his food scientists, there is
a a banana grower in Hawaii that does grow that
top banana, the o G banana, the Gross Michelle and
they went out, you know, the BBC interviewed this guy
and he was like, They're like, well, what it was
the Gross Michelle taste? Like he said, it tastes like
(11:46):
that fake banana flavor. Yeah, it tastes like a runt
to basically. Uh. And then and he said, you know,
when I first tasted, it made me think of banana flavoring.
So I want to get my hands on one of
those Gross Michelle. I want to go to Hawaii and
and check this thing out. Yeah. Same here. Next time
we're in Hawaii, Chuck, I'll bring you back some Gross
Michells because they're great for shipping. That's right, You just
(12:08):
drop one in the mail. Yeah. I will put some
stamps on it and send it to you. Ah, you
got anything else about gross Michelle or banana flavoring. No.
I thought this was super interesting. Me too. I've loved it.
So thanks for all the to the listeners who wrote
in to let us know about this wonderful little story.
Uh and in the meantime, everybody's short stuff is out.
(12:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's
chuck where the banana splits and this is short stuff.
Let's go. I thought you were gonna say we're bananas
for banana flavoring. I should have I think we should
retake this whole thing. Frankly, no, no way, not not
by a million years years. Was better than mine. Uh,
(00:26):
this is a good episode. Hats off to you for
putting it together. Thank you, But the hats really come
off to a few a handful of astute listeners. Chuck,
because I had no idea about this until in our
watermelon episode. If you'll remember, you started talking about how
just far off like banana candy flavor is from actual
(00:50):
banana taste, and I was like, you're absolutely right, and
they just like they just missed the mark so badly.
But after we we talked about that, um, we didn't
e lies. We'd accidentally stumbled into kind of like a
overlooked history of at least flavor science, if not pop
culture that some of our listeners wrote in, say, guys, guys,
get this, that banana flavoring actually is really dead on
(01:15):
to a banana that we don't eat anymore. It was
created back at a time when there's this banana that's
not around any longer was popular. And that's why it
seems weird to us because it doesn't taste like bananas
we eat today. And I just started tearing at my
clothing and shaking my head left and right. I was like,
gott to get a short stuff out as fast as
possible about this delirium, said, and when you heard there
(01:37):
was an O B that's right, an O G B
that's right. Uh. And that banana, my friends, is called
is it Michelle m the gross Michelle g R O
S M I C H E L. That was a
banana grown in the mid of the beginning of the
mid nineteenth century by off he grow in Jamaica. And uh,
(02:02):
we would you know, Big Mike would be his name
here in the States. But it was gross Michelle. And
this stuff was great for sitting around the world because
it grew in little tight bunches. It was very thick skin,
it was very slow to ripen after he picked it off,
and so it was really good as a as a
shipping fruit until disaster struck in that right. Yeah, So
(02:24):
so I think in the eighteen seventies around then the
gross Michelle like became the dominant banana and that lasted
all the way. That's how it's right. That lasted all
the way until the nineteen fifties when something called a
Panama disease or banana wilt, which is a fungal disease
that attacks banana plants um and it's caused by a
(02:47):
fungus called Fusarium oxy spoor um form us. Specialist Cuban say,
and it aroused the dead or something. I look out
behind you, chuck um and Uh, this particular soil dwelling
fungus really munches down on banana crops. And so after
seventy years of market dominance, the gross Michelle went basically
(03:13):
extinct in less than a decade because this banana wilt
just took hold and spread through the banana crops like wildfire. Yeah,
which is a problem when you have a monoculture, when
you have all these identical essentially plants and you have
a fungus that attacks it, Uh, you're gonna have no
more bananas or any sort of monoculture. So, like you said,
(03:37):
within ten years it's gone went from the O B
to the NOBI And everyone said, we gotta get a
new banana. We invented the cavendish, and that's what we
eat today. It's another monoculture, so something else comes along
that's trouble. But the cavendish is resistant to Panama disease,
and so far, so good. We're the cabinash is doing
(04:00):
pretty well. Yes, but there they've identified a couple of diseases.
The cavendish is not um resistant too, and so if
those diseases ever took hold, we'd have the same problem
all over again. So the banana growing industry does not
learn lessons very well. And that cavendish is if you
are eating a banana today, basically anywhere in the world,
there's genuinely a chance that banana is a Cavendish, because
(04:26):
not only is the cavendish the most widely grown variety
that supplies the world's bananas, um the the cavendishes that
are grown are actually clones of one another. Because it's
really really hard to get a banana to get sexy
with another banana, so they use clones. They take rhizomes
from one plant plant that grow another plant, and so
(04:50):
those plants are clones of one another, meaning they're not
very genetically dissimilar, they're pretty much identical. And um, that
means that if you have a disease that can take
out one of those plants, it can take out all
those plants. And so the Cavendish, like you said, is
in the same position that the gross Michelle is. We've
just lucked out by not happening yet. That's right. So
(05:13):
the top banana is gone, second banana is now dominant,
and I think that's time for a break before I
think of another bad pun, and we'll be right back. Well,
now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want
to learn a thing or two from Josh can Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, alrighty, so now
(05:58):
we're at the part where we talk about banana candy
and everything from an Hour Later's I'm sorry now and
Laters always said an hour Laters when I was too
now and Laters, which is really that's a huge sea change.
And I think about it, yeah, because they're saying like,
have them start now, and you're gonna be chewing them
(06:19):
later still too, because they don't go away very fast
or runts or Nico wafers, any of that stuff. You've
probably eaten it and said, this really doesn't taste like
a banana, and like you mentioned the beginning, it is
because it doesn't taste like a cabinish. Apparently it does
taste like a gross Michelle. And there is a very
nuanced story to why. Yeah, because the gist of the story,
(06:41):
the legend as it goes, is that they created this
banana flavoring to to mimic the dominant banana at the time,
the gross Michelle. The gross Michelle went extinct, but this
banana flavoring carried on. And so to those of us
alive today who've never had a gross Michelle, it seems
weird and foreign. But it's not like the chemists like
(07:02):
extracted gross Michelle and then injected into the candy and
then that's where banana flavoring came from. It's, like you said,
the whole thing was a lot more nuanced than that.
And in fact, they developed this artificial banana flavor and
then tinkered with it to make it mimic the gross
Michelle um, which as we'll see, they apparently did pretty well. Yeah,
(07:22):
so there was believe it or not, there's a banana
flavoring researcher. I think just general researcher, but an author
named Nadia Rubinstein who did a lot of research on this,
on this story and trace the development of the banana
flavoring back to nineteen twelve by these New Jersey chemists,
the I guess the Fritz brothers. Sure, Fritcha. It's like
(07:49):
Fritz and mixed together scch. It's kind of a weird name.
But they said that Frish she Fris the Freshi brothers.
But they were from New Jersey, so they didn't take
any guff and they didn't didn't want anybody poking around
their banana synthesizing operation. But uh not. Eve Rubenstein found
(08:10):
out that they did isolate from real bananas and that
they were they had to have been gross Michelle because
that was the again, the top banana. Right, So you say, well,
then the story is true. They took gross Michelle essence
and put it into candies. Still not quite right, because
it gets a little more convoluted than that, because what
they extracted from the gross Michelle and identified as basically
(08:32):
banana essence is a chemical compound called amal ascetate. And
it's not just found in bananas, it's found in other
fruits and it's actually one of the other fruits that
it's really kind of predominant. It is pairs and um.
Rubinstein found from a research that depending on the company
you're buying from and the decade it was, uh amal
(08:55):
ascetate would be marketed in their catalogs either as banana
essence or pair essence, and that over the years it
eventually is just kind of evened out into a generic
fruity essence because it's it is. It depends a lot
on the power of suggestion and the nose or tongue
of the beholder what fruit evokes. Yeah, and this is
(09:16):
I think where it gets super cool because, uh, if
you live in the UK, you probably eat a little
more pear than banana, or at least historically or culturally,
that's sort of the deal. Then you might hear in
the United States, I think Americans eat like what like
a hundred and thirty bananas a or something like that.
That's everyone around the world. Yeah, but the UK is
(09:38):
big on their pears and pear flavor things. So if
you take the very same exact vial of that what's
it called again, amial ascetate, amial acetate, he's sticking under
the nose. First of all, you say, get that beer
pine out of your hands so you can smell something
for a change, And they say, all right, and you
put that vial under the nose of someone from the UK,
(09:59):
they'll say, tastes like pears. Put that same vile under
an American. First of all, you smack the the cheap
light beer out of the American's hand and you put
that under their nose, and they'll say it tastes like
a banana. And it's the same thing, right, It's the
(10:19):
same vial. It all depends on what you've been exposed to.
Remember we were talking about like like Gray candy having
banana flavor. If you would even be able to recognize
this banana flavor, like I was right in a really
roundabout way, which I was sure super love that kind
of thing, um, because you you you have to basically
(10:39):
tell people this is banana candy, this flavor, it's banana flavor. Um.
And the thing is, though, is they really did kind
of nail the taste of gross Michelle with this um
amial acetate. Because upon later inspection, food science and flavoring
science has gotten exponentially more sophisticated than it was back
(11:02):
in n when the Fritzie Brothers were working UM and
they found that that Gross Michelle bananas had more of
a related compound called iso amal acetate than the Cavendish does.
And UM that because of this kind of thicker concentration
of amal acetate in this this banana flavoring, it evokes
(11:25):
the Gross Michelle way more than it does the Cavendish.
And like you said, beyond his food scientists, there is
a a banana grower in Hawaii that does grow that
top banana, the o G banana, the Gross Michelle and
they went out, you know, the BBC interviewed this guy
and he was like, They're like, well, what it was
the Gross Michelle taste? Like he said, it tastes like
(11:46):
that fake banana flavor. Yeah, it tastes like a runt
to basically. Uh. And then and he said, you know,
when I first tasted, it made me think of banana flavoring.
So I want to get my hands on one of
those Gross Michelle. I want to go to Hawaii and
and check this thing out. Yeah. Same here. Next time
we're in Hawaii, Chuck, I'll bring you back some Gross
Michells because they're great for shipping. That's right, You just
(12:08):
drop one in the mail. Yeah. I will put some
stamps on it and send it to you. Ah, you
got anything else about gross Michelle or banana flavoring. No.
I thought this was super interesting. Me too. I've loved it.
So thanks for all the to the listeners who wrote
in to let us know about this wonderful little story.
Uh and in the meantime, everybody's short stuff is out.
(12:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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