OV9

As some of you will know, on Tenerife they grow a lot of Bananas. What I wasn't aware of was that they are not allowed to sell them into the EU but only within mainland Spain.

This is because the Canarian bananas don't meet the EU specification for the size and shape of Bananas meaning the EU import more from Central & South America.

They look like normal bananas for goodness sake. Bananas about bananas

I guess with Brexit we can take back control of what bananas we want, so we can enjoy some Tenerifian bananas at long last?

Mito Man wrote: Mon Jan 02, 2023 11:19 am I guess with Brexit we can take back control of what bananas we want, so we can enjoy some Tenerifian bananas at long last?

Right on brother.

FYI below is an EU spec breaking banana

It looks a bit too curved

In all seriousness I remember going to a banana plantation and hand picking these ripe bananas and they were absolutely delicious - and I say that as a banana hater. Then I ended up overdoing the nana liqueur and promptly projectile vomited the whole lot and decided that I still hate bananas.

Bigger issue is that the vast majority of the global banana crops are of the Cavendish variety and that's apparently under threat by some kind of blight.

I remember getting some finger sized ones in Indonesia that were delicious, but with a different flavour. Maybe we should broaden our (curved, yellowish) horizons?

The whole bananagate thing is a bit silly and also an example of how fruit and veg is graded around the world. All fruit and veg that we buy in the supermarkets is graded by size and shape, which is a process of quality control to group the produce into different sizes and quality levels. That's why we have a separate stream of products that are 'wonky', which contain the malformed, outsized and broken items.

The EU never actually banned bananas, however there are size, shape and quality grades for bananas, which there will also be for all fruit and veg. This is so that buyers know what they're going to get when they order stock from around the world. If the bananas don't meet class A (or whatever the highest grade is for bananas is), then it's probably not worth exporting them, because bananas are a loss leader in supermarkets and anything that's not the best quality will have reduced value, eating into an already razor thin profit margin.

As far as I know, under EU rules we could import any bananas we want, however it's simply not economical to do so, hence slightly misshapen ones get sold domestically, closer to the site of production.

DeskJockey wrote: Mon Jan 02, 2023 12:38 pm Bigger issue is that the vast majority of the global banana crops are of the Cavendish variety and that's apparently under threat by some kind of blight.

I remember getting some finger sized ones in Indonesia that were delicious, but with a different flavour. Maybe we should broaden our (curved, yellowish) horizons?

That Cavendish thing has been going around for a few years, not sure if there's been any developments, it was big news about five years ago. Banana plants are clones of each other, so certain diseases have the ability to wipe out an entire variety. This happened before with the Gros Michel IIRC.

The reason Cavendish are so popular is that they are a good size, have a good yield, they're quite firm and therefore travel well and ripen nicely off the tree. They don't have the best flavour and there's loads of other varieties, in South America you get banana/plantain stalls which have loads to choose from including red bananas, blue bananas, small, large etc.

I'm sure it isn't current news in the banana world. Crop diversification is clearly needed and we need to be less picky about fruit.

I remember since my first school biology lesson they were bleating on about bananas, vanilla and cocoa plants going extinct. Still waiting for it to happen along with the worlds oil drying up

Same as any fruit and veg tbh. Supermarkets and the convenience food industry are all about standardising so they favour varieties of fruit and veg that are stable and will give reliable yields of produce with uniform size and shape. These varieties are rarely the best tasting ones and fruit will always taste better when it's ripened on the plant.

Bananas are gross though. Impossible to improve except by nuking from orbit.

Bananas on some ice cream with a crumbled choc digestive is good tho.

An added benefit of not being in the eu dictatorship.