Ooooh I get to be the know it all asshole who says this and the runts flavor banana don’t taste like banana to us because we’re used to the modern dominant banana cultivar, the Cavandish, while the inventor of Runts and Laffy Taffy were familiar with the then dominant banana cultivar, the Gros Michele!
The Gros Michele was swapped out as it was plagued by blight and the Cavandish was resistant to this kind of blight. Nowadays, the Cavandish is also starting to show signs of mass blight issues and some growers are considering switching back to the Gros Michele to combat that!
Edit: Whoohoo! I’m wrong and I learned new things!
Bananas are a mono-crop. There was a disease in the latter half of the 20th century that threatened all bananas on the planet. A particular strain survived called the Cavendish. It is what you NOW think of as a banana. The candy tastes like the way bananas used to taste.
counterpoint: https://youtu.be/I9ZtvpBoXzI
TL;DW banana candy does not taste like gros michel either
He did find that the artificial banana flavor tastes the way gros michel bananas smell when they’re very ripe, though. So I don’t think it’s wrong to say the flavor is based on the gros michel rather than the cavendish, it’s just that flavor is a really complex equation and artificial flavors tend to fail to capture the totality of the experience.
