This article is adapted from the August 28, 2021, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here. I eat a banana just about every day. But for almost my entire life, I only ever ate one kind: the Cavendish. Originally from China, it’s the banana variety that conquered the world: the same color, taste, and shape nearly everywhere you go. But in the banana’s ancestral homelands—Southeast Asia, India, various Pacific Islands—the fruit is found in endless varieties. They are yellow or red or blue. Some are…
