and candy or medicine tastes nothing like an actual banana?

This blew my mind when I found out.

So in the 1800s

when bananas were first being introduced to America

there were a handful of varieties

but one became super popular called the Gros Michel.

And that's because it made a ton

of fruit and was easy to ship all around the world.

And that is what artificial banana flavor

was based off of.

But the problem was decades later in the 1950s

a fungal disease basically destroyed that entire species.

And so as a result, this guy, the Cavendish became popular

because it was resistant to that fungal disease.

So every single time you taste banana flavoring,

you're actually tasting a banana of the past.