From the latest issue of Jeremy’s newsletter:
The standard story of the banana’s domestication and spread is that it started in southeast Asia, popped across to Africa and then went to the Caribbean and the tropical zones of the Americas. Peru’s best kept banana secret looks into a very special group of bananas called Iholena cultivars. That’s their Hawaiian name, and a clue to the reverse journey they made, east across the Pacific. The taste of these varieties reflects “a rich and lingering semi-sweetness piqued with a lemony tang”. That may be one reason people in Peru like them. Another is that they are very nutritious; the pink-orange pulp is high in vitamin A precursors. ProMusa advises waiting until the skin is black before eating one of these bananas, should you be so lucky, because the peel turns yellow before the fruit is ripe.
There’s more where that came from.