Once backpackers infiltrate a population, there is one item that inevitably falls onto the local menu: the banana pancake. A pancake made with something starchy (either rice or wheat flour) interspersed with chunks of banana. As a menu item, it represents the tipping point between tourists finding it straightforward to find local specialties and tourists only being able to find restaurants serving food specifically targeted at them; the precursor meals to the global franchise onslaught. Why is it this dish that acts as the bellwether for the arrival of insipid tourist fodder?

Pancakes are a universal food. Any culture with a readily accessible source of starch already makes a reasonable pancake. The key to the spread of pancakes onto tourist focussed menus is their translatability. Even if a dish is completely different from pancakes, the English language (amongst others) lacks the nuance to describe them in a succinct manner. When something fried, starchy and flat arrives in front of you, what comes to mind? If you’re served up a plate of roti, murtabak, pannenkoeken or blini, then the first English word that you’d use to describe it is “pancake” even if the dish is almost unrecognisable from the specific pancake that you eat at home.

If you’ve ever tried to make roti at home, to attempt to throw that ethereal tissue-thin dough into wide layer and float its ghostly form onto a well-oiled benchtop, then you probably know what it feels like to get dough stuck in your arm hair. This is not a sensation that one associates with the manafacture of pancakes. Roti, like almost all regional variations on pancake, is a recipe that in all but ultimate appearance is distinct from pancakes. But turn up to a roti vendor in Pai, Madras or Capetown and if they have any contact with the mass tourism industry then in all likelihood, they’ll have the word “pancake” gaily displayed on their stand, prefixed by the word “banana”.

The availability of bananas in the tropics (and their relative price compared to every other tropical fruit) explains the spread of the dish around warmer climes but once you depart from the banana abundance, why is the banana pancake equally ubiquitous where backpackers congregate?

Any monkey with potable water, a bucket of miscellaneous flour and a hand of bananas can make them. They rarely reward culinary skill. They reward the wrong people. Why would you teach your kids to make the time-consuming, subtlety-packed local cuisine when you could be ensuring their future wealth by serving the simplest and most profitable food possible to an undiscerning audience?

This isn’t to say that banana pancakes aren’t already endemic in some local populations nor do they necessarily always signal a decline in local eating as EatingAsia’s palm sugar topped, flattened banana displays. But on the balance, when pancakes slide onto the menu, local specialties tend to be subsumed.