Tell me you've never eaten a Gros Michel without telling me you've never eaten a Gros Michel.

BTW, if you want nutritious bananas, you don't want the mainstream A*/B* lineages at all, you want the fe'i (Pacific) lineages. They have so much beta carotene that not only is their flesh golden, but they'll turn your urine fluorescent as well ;) Most are cooking bananas, but there are some 'Karat' varities that are good out-of-hand if you let them ripen long enough.

I've got bad news for you: despite what you read online, Gros Michel tastes almost exactly the same as Cavendish. Maybe slightly better, but not very different. Which is why Cavendish was chosen from the ~1000+ banana cultivars out there to replace it. If you want new tastes, Gros Michel is not the banana you should be looking for.

Nutritional content is, realistically, better. PPO is pretty much an antinutrient (in addition to degrading polyphenols, it also degrades vitamin C and protein digestability).

This is, once again, NOT about ripening, it's about oxidation of the flesh after you cut it open. Please, people READ.

People who write this almost exclusively have never eaten a Gros Michel.

Regardless of what people write online, it tastes almost identical to a Cavendish. That's why Cavendish was chosen to replace it. It's maybe a bit better, but it's not a radically different cultivar. There are radically different cultivars, and we should be adopting them more!

Once again, for the 20 millionth time this thread: reread the article. This isn't about ripening. This is about the flesh browning when exposed to air after peeling.

Not "nonripe". Fully ripe. They just down turn brown quickly after peeling; you don't need lemon juice to suppress the browning.

This isn't about ripening at all, it's about the oxidation of the peeled flesh.

Yet another person misreads the article.

This is about the browning of the flesh of peeled bananas, not the browning of the skin of unpeeled bananas.

It annoys me so much that stores almost never carry anything except Cavendish, as if it were the only banana cultivar on Earth. :P

I'll get my kiwis from the guy down in the street near the Canadian border.

I mean... ;)

. I haven't tasted a good navel orange in a couple decades

It's HLB. Really sucks :( First detected in Florida in 2005 (was probably there earlier, as the asian citrus psyllid was detected in 1998, and it takes years for infected trees to show symptoms); it took off like wildfire. The industry basically gave up fighting it and just sells the crappy oranges from infected trees; almost all mature orange trees in Florida are infected.

Until a cure is found, your oranges are going to continue to be crappy :(

As for how to fix it, well, you have to align incentives. One, you have to get rid of the cold chain where possible, because again, refrigeration of most produce is a quality killer. And two, you need to get consumers definitive quality metrics on the label - otherwise they're just going to pick what's cheapest. I'm not saying give them e.g. raw brix, TA, TPI, etc figures and tell them to figure it out for themselves, but one can readily create one or more composite scores that scientifically quantify the quality of the product. If one set of tomatoes is 5% cheaper but has half the quality score of the 5% more expensive tomatoes, most buyers will choose the tastier ones. But without that data, how are they supposed to know?

Oh, and in the specific case of bananas, please, supply chains, for the love of Crom, add more cultivars to your repertoire. You'll sell a dozen differerent cultivars of apples - why are all your of your bananas Cavendish???. Bananas are so diverse, let people experience the different appearances and tastes! I wish mysore-group ones in particular were widely available.

Over farming means there aren't enough nutrients in the soil

Fertilizer means that there are. You're confusing reductions in soil carbon with reductions in nutrient availability.

Reduction in soil carbon isn't good, but it's not a nutrient. It does a number of things - reduces water retention (so you have to irrigate during drought), can potentially reduce aeration (depends), leads to less soil biodiversity (can be good or bad, but in general usually more bad than good), and less nutrient *retention* - but that doesn't mean "less nutrients", it means you have to apply more often and there's more runoff. But the plants still grow great.

Or to put it another way, you know hydroponics? Famously a high-yield process? Most hydroponic media are inert. No soil carbon. Plants do not need soil carbon. They need sufficient water at a proper steadiness, sufficient oxygen, and sufficient nutrients.

Indeed, excess nutrients can sometimes damage quality. Nitrogen for example encourages rapid growth, but this can sometimes come at the cost of product quality. Excess water also can tend to "water down" fruits. Again, just the opposite problem to what you think.

And oranges are just a waste of money now. They're just balls of cellulose.

Sadly, the decline in citrus quality in the US isn't about soil, it's about HLB

But for most fruits...

so much of it tastes like garbage

Your main enemy is the overreliance on productivity as the metric rather than quality. For example, tomatoes. It's commonly said that the reason store tomatoes are bad are because they're picked green. Well... kind of. If they're picked light green, with no reddening beginning, yes, that will yield a very bad tomato. But blinded consumer acceptance studies consistently show that if the tomatoes are picked after they've started blushing, then ripened, consumers can't tell the difference in taste vs. vine ripened. I've done the test myself back in hort school, and verified it. The problem isn't when they're picked, it's the cultivar. They're optimized for even ripening, longevity (thick skins), and truly extreme yields. You can grow the same cultivar in your garden at home and give it all of the nurture and love you want... you'll still get a bland tomato out of it. There are things you can do to improve taste, like increasing eC shortly before harvest (basically "salting the tomato while it's still on the vine), but you're fighting an uphill battle.

(Also, if they refrigerate the tomatoes, that's a real quality killer :P

Oh, and just in case this was about bananas (you might have just meant it generally):

they grow the fruit to be too large so the tree cannot get the flavor components to the fruit.

Bananas don't grow on trees. They're more like a giant grass (or more specifically, like a ginger - they're in the same order of monocots as ginger, same clade of monocots as grasses). Not woody. Swing a machete at one and it'll go straight through. The stems are very juicy (the juice tastes like banana skin ;) ).