The taste of banana-flavoured candy is often assumed to copy the old Gros Michel banana, which dominated the American market before Cavendish bananas took over. In fact, candy makers chose isoamyl acetate because it was simple and cheap to produce, not because it resembled any banana. Real bananas of every variety get their flavour from many compounds working together, and isoamyl acetate occurs naturally in bananas and in other fruits and fermented drinks. It is more concentrated in Gros Michel bananas than in Cavendish, which is why it was a convenient match for that flavour in memory. The candy is a single-note version of a complex fruit.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.