Lots of things taste like vanilla, but that generic vanilla taste is as authentic as the generic banana taste. Real vanilla tastes very different from the chemical imitation that you find in every cheap dairy product. The “plain” in this story is refering to that fake vanilla. Real vanilla is still very much rare, expensive and exceptional.
Edit: fun fact, the fake banana taste is actually based off of the “gris michel” banana. This specific banana cultivar was THE generic banana you could buy in every grocery store. Until the 1950’s when almost the whole species went extinct due to a decease. The “panama disease”. Heavy monoculture farming made the banana industry extremely suseptible. Within a few years, all major farms were destroyed. Now we have a different banana cultuvar, the “Cavendish”. This banana is not susceptible to the panama disease,but variations of the panama disease are allready showing up around the world.
For what it’s worth, it probably won’t go extinct. Even if there wasn’t a more resistant cultivar, they’d probably just get really expensive. It’s still possible to get gros michael and others, just not as easily or for less than $1 USD unless the buyer lives near a plantation.
So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they’re basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!
I think it might be more that the industrialization of agriculture made rare flavors far more commonplace.
Even real vanilla isn’t all that expensive or hard to come by anymore. Virtually every grocery store has it in quantities that will suffice for anything but full on commercial needs.
So it has become a default flavor, exactly because it is both cheap to acquire and popular to consume. Not unlike chocolate (which, I might argue, is more vanilla than even mediocre quality vanilla).
Lots of things taste like vanilla, but that generic vanilla taste is as authentic as the generic banana taste. Real vanilla tastes very different from the chemical imitation that you find in every cheap dairy product. The “plain” in this story is refering to that fake vanilla. Real vanilla is still very much rare, expensive and exceptional.
Edit: fun fact, the fake banana taste is actually based off of the “gris michel” banana. This specific banana cultivar was THE generic banana you could buy in every grocery store. Until the 1950’s when almost the whole species went extinct due to a decease. The “panama disease”. Heavy monoculture farming made the banana industry extremely suseptible. Within a few years, all major farms were destroyed. Now we have a different banana cultuvar, the “Cavendish”. This banana is not susceptible to the panama disease,but variations of the panama disease are allready showing up around the world.
since all the plantations are clones of the same banana its just a matter of time until we lose the banan
For what it’s worth, it probably won’t go extinct. Even if there wasn’t a more resistant cultivar, they’d probably just get really expensive. It’s still possible to get gros michael and others, just not as easily or for less than $1 USD unless the buyer lives near a plantation.
So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they’re basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!
Still, it’s cool that you can do that. Seems crazy to lock down imports like that.
I think it might be more that the industrialization of agriculture made rare flavors far more commonplace.
Even real vanilla isn’t all that expensive or hard to come by anymore. Virtually every grocery store has it in quantities that will suffice for anything but full on commercial needs.
So it has become a default flavor, exactly because it is both cheap to acquire and popular to consume. Not unlike chocolate (which, I might argue, is more vanilla than even mediocre quality vanilla).