The 1923 musical hit "Yes, We Have No Bananas" is said to have been inspired by a shortage of the "Big Mike" bananas, which began with the infestation of Panama disease early in the 20th century.

By 1960, the major importers of Gros Michel bananas were nearly bankrupt, and had waited to deal with the financial and environmental crisis. The Cavendish was cultivated so consumers would still be able to obtain bananas.

The international name of this banana variety is ‘Gros Michel’ (Musa acuminata AAA). This variety was once the dominant export banana to Europe and North America, grown in South America and Africa. In the 1950s, Panama disease, a wilt caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum, wiped out vast tracts of ‘Gros Michel’ plantations in South America and Africa, but the cultivar survived in Thailand.

After the banana catastrophe, South American and African plantations switched to the resistant Cavendish banana subgroup (another Musa acuminata AAA). The clone ‘Dwarf Cavendish’, today’s food banana in the west, has a different flavour, a different morphology (‘Gros Michel’ is slimmer), and unlike ‘Gros Michel,’ they do not turn fully yellow in tropical lowlands. A ‘Gros Michel’ can reach 7 m tall, while a ‘Dwarf Cavendish’ only reaches about 2 m. A Malaysian variety within the Cavendish subgroup sometimes found in Thailand is ‘Gluay hom kiao’.