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This topic is for discussing clues and potential answers to the Grocery Symbol in Epic Week 2024. Please stay on topic. Remember, these riddles are designed to be challenging and require a group of people brainstorming together; don't feel intimidated if you don't know the answer right away. Every little idea can help. Research is not cheating; it is expected!
Click here to visit the location of the Grocery Symbol
Click here to visit the location of the Grocery Symbol
this riddle is bananas!!
Congrats on solving this symbol! The answer was "Gros Michel banana cultivar".
For those of you wondering how this answer could be arrived at, here's a quick explanation.
Did you know that bananas used to taste more like bananas than they do now? What we think of as "banana flavor" is isoamyl acetate. When you eat a candy flavored with "fake" banana, it's just a whole lot of isoamyl acetate and sugar stirred together.
The type of banana we all get in our grocery stores today, the Cavendish banana, has some isoamyl acetate, but not a lot.
Before the 1960s, the type of banana you would see in grocery stores was bigger and bolder and contained noticeably more isoamyl acetate -- it tasted closer to the banana flavor you can still get in taffy or a box of runts. This was the Gros Michel banana, the first banana to be commercially exported around the world.
Unfortunately, since all of the Gros Michel bananas were seedless and therefore had to be cloned from one another, they were genetically identical and could easily be wiped out by any illness that impacted them. During the 50s, a fungus known as Panama disease wiped out virtually all of them.
You can still get Gros Michel bananas today from certain specialty growers, if you're desperate to know what people thought of as banana in the 1950s and earlier, but you'll have to be prepared to shell out something like $20 per banana. Not per bunch, per fruit.
For those of you wondering how this answer could be arrived at, here's a quick explanation.
Did you know that bananas used to taste more like bananas than they do now? What we think of as "banana flavor" is isoamyl acetate. When you eat a candy flavored with "fake" banana, it's just a whole lot of isoamyl acetate and sugar stirred together.
The type of banana we all get in our grocery stores today, the Cavendish banana, has some isoamyl acetate, but not a lot.
Before the 1960s, the type of banana you would see in grocery stores was bigger and bolder and contained noticeably more isoamyl acetate -- it tasted closer to the banana flavor you can still get in taffy or a box of runts. This was the Gros Michel banana, the first banana to be commercially exported around the world.
Unfortunately, since all of the Gros Michel bananas were seedless and therefore had to be cloned from one another, they were genetically identical and could easily be wiped out by any illness that impacted them. During the 50s, a fungus known as Panama disease wiped out virtually all of them.
You can still get Gros Michel bananas today from certain specialty growers, if you're desperate to know what people thought of as banana in the 1950s and earlier, but you'll have to be prepared to shell out something like $20 per banana. Not per bunch, per fruit.
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