If you've ever eaten artificial banana flavouring — in sweets, milkshakes or medicine — and thought it tasted nothing like a real banana, here's a popular theory: it might taste like a banana you've never eaten.

The Big Mike

For the first half of the twentieth century, the banana sold in shops across Europe and North America was mostly a variety called the Gros Michel — "Big Mike". By many accounts it was larger, creamier, and had a richer flavour than today's banana. Its thick skin also made it tough enough to ship green across oceans.

Then the fungus came.

A disease in the soil

Panama disease, caused by a soil fungus, attacks banana plants through their roots and blocks the vessels that carry water. The plant wilts and dies. Worse, the fungus can survive in soil for decades, so you can't simply replant.

It spread through plantations across Central America and the Caribbean in the early twentieth century. Companies kept moving to fresh land, clearing new forest, but the disease followed. By the 1950s, the Gros Michel export industry was collapsing.

Why one fungus could kill a whole variety

Here's the strange part: commercial bananas don't have useful seeds. They're grown from cuttings, which means every Gros Michel plant was essentially a clone — genetically identical.

The industry switched to the Cavendish, a variety that resisted the strain of the fungus that had destroyed the Gros Michel. The Cavendish is the banana most of the world eats today.

It is also a clone.