There are more than 500 varieties of banana, all virtually genetically identical. It is
possible that you had a different variety than Cavendish. Or it is posible that the plant
from which they came was infected.
There is a significant possibility that the worldwide banana industry will be wiped out
in 10 years time.
But the most likely possibility is :
“A man working in the produce section once said that fruit from the grocery store can
go from unripe to past ripe (or bad) without actually being ripe and good because of
having been refrigerated. If it's kept too cold, it won't ripen. When I buy peaches in
the summer this often happens to me--they're hard one day and then the next they're
still hard but getting rotten spots on them”.
In my location the dominant retailers have virtually destroyed the fresh fruit market.
At one time (20 years ago) you could get fresh fruit in season, either home grown or
imported. The availability did not last long and the fruit was allways expensive, much
more so than the tinned variety on which most people were brought up. But it had one
outstanding characteristic, it WOULD ripen to a delicious naturally sweet and
flavoursome fruit.
Nowadays you can buy strawberries, peaches, nectarines, and pears at any time of the
year. They have been grown in foreign parts, picked unripe, and refrigerated. They are
special supermarket varieties developed for appearance and shelf life which is more
important to the retailers than flavour or ripening qualities. The overall result is that it
is virtually impossible in my locality to get fresh fruit at ANY time of the year. At
least, any that is worth eating. I have given up eating peaches, nectarines, strawberries
and most pears because you buy them hard, wait for them to ripen, but they go
immediately to rotten, at least in the middle, while sometimes remaining unripe on
the outside. On the rare occasion that they are edible they have the flavour and texture
of damp blotting paper. In my opinion, the supermarkets are operating a fraud,
because they know that the fruit they sell will never ripen.
I had thought it would be better in the United States because you have your own
agricultural fruit industry. But it seems not. It seems to me that the only cure is to stop
eating it altogether, leave it on the shelf and on the dessert trolley in restaurants. This
allways makes the point to sellers if enough people do it.
So much for the admonition to eat more fruit.
