It’s strange that one variety became the banana.
Field Notes
There are more than a thousand varieties of bananas growing around the world, yet most of us grow up believing a banana is one specific shape, one specific color, and one specific taste. Somewhere along the way, an extraordinary family of fruit was quietly reduced to a single standardized version because it shipped well, ripened predictably, and fit neatly into a global system. We lost more than variety—we lost the expectation that something so familiar could still surprise us. Sometimes the world isn’t becoming less interesting. It’s just becoming more standardized.