Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Artificial Banana Flavor

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. We're the banana splits.

And this is short stuff. Let's go. I thought you were going to say, we're bananas for banana flavoring. I should have. I think we should retake this whole thing, frankly. Yeah, yours is better. No, no way. Not by a million years. Yours was better than mine. 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 banana taste. And I was like, you're absolutely right. And they just, like they just missed the mark so badly. But after we talked about that, we didn't realize

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 and said, guys, guys, get this, that banana flavoring actually is really dead on 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 out my clothing and shaking my head left and right. I was like, you've got to get a short stuff out as fast as possible about this. Delirium set in when you heard there was an OB. That's right. An OGB. That's right. And that banana, my friends, is called, is it Michelle? The gross

Michelle, G-R-O-S-M-I-C-H-E-L. That was a banana grown in the mid the beginning of the mid 19th century by a coffee grower in Jamaica. And 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 sending around the world because it grew in little tight bunches. It was very thick skinned. It was very slow to ripen after you picked it off. And so it was really good as a shipping fruit until disaster struck. Isn't that right? Yeah. So I think in the 1870s, around then, the gross Michelle like became the dominant banana. And that lasted all the way until the 1950s when something called a Panama disease or banana wilt, which is a fungal disease that attacks banana plants. And it's caused by a

fungus called fusarium oxysporum formospecialis cubensae. I think it just aroused to the dead or something. I think it did too. Look out behind you, Chuck. Yeah. This particular soil-dwelling fungus really munches down on banana crops. And so after 70 years of market dominance, the gross Michelle went basically extinct in less than a decade because this banana wilt just took a 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, you're going to have no more bananas or any sort of monoculture. So like you said, within 10 years, it's gone. It went from the OB to the NoB. And

everyone said, we got to get a new banana. We invented the cavendish. And that's what we eat today. It's another monoculture. So if something else comes along, that's trouble. But the cavendish is resistant to Panama disease. And so far, so good. The cavendish is doing pretty well. Yes, but they've identified a couple of diseases the cavendish is not resistant to. 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 is genuinely a 99% chance that that banana is a cavendish. Because not only is the cavendish the most widely grown variety that

supplies the world's bananas, 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. Sure. So they use clones. They take rhizomes from one plant, plant that, grow another plant. And so those plants are clones of one another, meaning they're not very genetically dissimilar. They're pretty much identical. And 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 it not happening yet. That's right. So 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. You're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in

and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All righty. So now we're at the part where we talk about banana candy and everything from an hour later, I'm sorry, now and later. I always said an hour later when I was a kid. Now and

later, which is really, that's a huge sea change now. Yeah, because they're saying like, and you're going to be chewing them later still too, because they don't go away very fast. Or runts or neck away furs, any of that stuff. You've probably eaten it and said, this really doesn't taste like a banana. And like you mentioned at the beginning, it's because it doesn't taste like a cabbage. Apparently, it does taste like a gross Michelle. And there is a very nuanced story to why. Yeah, because what the gist of the story, the legend as it goes, is that they created this banana flavoring 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 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, which as we'll see, they apparently did pretty well. Yeah, so there was a, believe it or not, there's a banana flavoring researcher, I think just general researcher, but an author named Nadia Rubenstein, who did a lot of research on this on this story and trace the development of the banana flavoring back to

1912 by these New Jersey chemists, the, I guess the Fritz brothers. Sure. Fritscha. Fritscha. It's like Fritz and Nietzsche mixed together. S-C-H-E. It's kind of a weird name. Fritscha. Fritscha. Fritschie. Fritschie. The Fritschie brothers. But they were from New Jersey, so they didn't take any guff and they didn't want anybody poking around their banana synthesizing operation. But Nadia Rubenstein found 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 banana essence is a chemical compound called amyl acetate 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 pears and Rubenstein found from a research that depending on the company you're buying from and the decade it was, amyl acetate would be marketed in their catalogs either as banana essence or pear essence and that over the years, it eventually just kind of evened out into a generic fruity essence because it depends a lot on the power of suggestion and the nose or tongue of the beholder, what fruit it evokes. Yeah. And this is, I think, where it gets super cool because

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 130 bananas a year or something like that? That's everyone around the world. Oh, that's everybody. That's how much bananas they eat. Yeah. But the UK is big on their pears and pear flavor thing. So you take the very same exact vial of that, what's it called again? Amyl acetate. Amyl acetate, you stick it under the nose. First of all, you say, get that beer pint out of your hand so you can smell something for a change. And they say, right. And you put that vial under the nose of someone from the UK, they'll say, taste like pear. And that's what we

think about the Brits. Put that same vial under an American, first of all, you smack the cheap, light beer out of the Americans hand. Okay. And you put that under their nose and they'll say, oh, it tastes like a banana. And it's the same thing. Right. It's the 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'd even be able to recognize this banana flavor, like I was right in a really roundabout way, which I love super love that kind of thing. Because you have to basically tell people this is banana candy. This flavor, it's banana flavor. And the thing is though, is they really did kind of nail the taste of gross Michelle with this amyl acetate, because upon later inspection,

food science and flavoring science has gotten exponentially more sophisticated than it was back in 1912 when the Fritschi brothers were working. And they found that gross Michelle bananas had more of a related compound called isoamyl acetate than the Cavendish does. And that because of this kind of thicker concentration of amyl acetate in this banana flavoring, it evokes the gross Michelle way more than it does the Cavendish. And like you said, beyond just food scientists, there is a banana grower in Hawaii that does grow that top banana, the OG banana, the gross Michelle. And they went out and the BBC interviewed this guy and he was like, well, what does the gross Michelle taste like? He said, it tastes like that fake banana

flavor. It tastes like a runt, basically. And then he said, you know, when I first tasted it, it made me think of banana flavoring. So I want to get my hands on one of those gross Michelle's. I want to go to Hawaii and check this thing out. Yeah, same here. Next time we're in Hawaii, Chuck, I'll bring you back some gross Michelle's because they're great for shipping. That's right. You drop one in the mail. Yeah, I will put some stamps on it and send it to you. You got anything else about gross Michelle or banana flavoring? No, I thought this was super interesting. Me too. I'd loved it. So thanks for all the to the listeners who wrote in to let us know about this wonderful little story. And in the meantime, everybody's short stuff is out.