MOS: The Origin Of Artificial Banana Flavor

So have you eaten something banana flavored and immediately had regrets about some of your life choices? Allegedly that means you would have hated the banana variety we had in the 1940s.

But was the artificial banana flavor really based on some virtually extinct banana, or is this a myth we can shed some light on?

Today’s Moment of Science… dead bananas tell some tales.

When scientists first replicated a banana flavor to bottle it up in the mid nineteenth century, they weren’t necessarily aiming to replicate a banana. In the fuck-around-and-find-out days of synthetic organic chemistry, they were trying to find stuff that smelled fruit-ish and probably wouldn’t make you too dead.

Per flavor scientist Nadia Bernstein, this same compound that we know as banana flavor was first used in England as an artificial pear flavor. It was recognizable to palates there as the Jargonelle pear. However, chemical catalogs from the US in the 1850s advertise the same compound as both ‘pear oil’ and ‘banana essence.’ 

At the time, the banana wasn’t common enough that the average American was all too accustomed to it. It was two decades later in 1876 when the first banana farm opened in Florida. The same year it was on exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial where surely nobody made a single blowjob joke about people downing the phallic fruit.

Then bananas started being imported to the US like bonkers. The Boston Fruit Company- eventually the United Fruit Company and then finally Chiquita- got into the business of importing bananas and fucking up large swaths of South and Central America. At one point they ran the postal service in Guatemala and were the single largest landowner in the country. 

Also I’m pretty sure the CIA went and coup’d a democratically elected leader in Guatemala because, you know, we needed to keep exploiting labor for bananas. Slight oversimplification but I stand by it.

Much like humans, plagues can fuck up plants too. Panama disease, or banana wilt, is a fungus that drove the Gros Michel virtually to extinction in the 1950s. In attempt to replace it, the Cavendish was chosen. Not so much for its sweetness or flavor, but for being able to resist Panama disease while growing in the same soil as the now useless Gros Michel.

But back to chemistry and flavors because in 1912, a chemist named Clemens Kleber decided he was going to rip a banana apart molecule by molecule and figure out what made it intrinsically banana-esque.

Sonofabitch found amyl acetate, the same stuff they’d been using for over fifty years. That’s a pretty spot-on job of fuck-around-and-find-out when the compound they’d synthesized for banana flavor happened to be in the banana.

The stuff used in artificial banana flavor today is generally isoamyl acetate, but amyl acetate is also used and is described as having a scent reminiscent of both apples and bananas. It’s also possible that, due to different naming conventions at the time, what he isolated was actually isoamyl acetate. 

So why do bananas taste good and Laffy Taffy tastes like you failed Halloween? 

Even though it’s not where we got the flavor from, if you get a Gros Michel today it would have a more distinct ‘artificial’ banana flavor than the Cavendish because of higher isoamyl acetate levels.

But even then, almost no flavor occurring in nature is made up of one compound. You know how artificial vanilla tastes… wrong? It’s not because the chemical in it doesn’t occur in vanilla, but naturally occurring vanilla has a ton of other compounds that contribute to the flavor. Same thing with artificial banana flavor, it hits you with banana vibes but it’s missing all those little nuances by having just one chemical in the mix. 

This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you to fact check carefully because I was four sources deep before I found out the flavor was not based on the Gros Michel.

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