Bananas are fairly easy to cultivate in tropical climates, so large plantations have sprung up in Central America, Africa, and East Asia.

They can be grown year-round, and are fairly productive plants that start popping out bananas rapidly - you don’t have to wait years and years like many other fruit-bearing trees.

A lot of other fruits are seasonal, slow growing, or difficult to cultivate outside of their native range.

There are downsides though - banana farming is labor intensive and the plants are highly susceptible to some infections because they’re all clones.

They are able to be picked green and transported cool. The distributor then ripens just what they are delivering that day.

Very few fruits are as easy to transport.

Here is a video of the process https://youtu.be/SgFKfVfghpg

It definitely hasn't always been everywhere. My grandfather - British - served during the 2nd World War in a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers workshop in India, fixing broken down vehicles for the war effort. The way my dad describes it, he had a very good war because he seemingly spent the whole time dicking around with tools and stealing bananas from the back of lorries on a motor bike.

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He knew what bananas were but, in the UK at least, they were rare items that perhaps you'd get as a treat at Christmas, in much the same way if you were lucky you might get a satsuma or clementine around Christmas. But there, in India, where bananas were grown locally and incredibly plentiful, they'd transport them around in the back on these slow, ponderous, open topped lorries. He would have to take various vehicles out for drives to test them after fixing them up, so whenever he had something fast he took it upon himself to grab a stick, go for a ride and try and hook a bunch of bananas like he's trying to win a stuffed toy at a fairground.

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I imagine the locals thought he was a bit nuts, risking life and limb for these boring fruit that were ten a penny but for him they were these absurdly exotic treats and here he was, able to hook more in one grab than he'd ever seen in one place in his whole life. And that was only 75 years ago!

I don’t know how ubiquitous they are worldwide. When my son was in China for a year of HS, for example, his house father got bananas as a treat for his birthday

easy to grow. easy to ship (think how tough they are before they get ripe). A lot of people think they're tasty. They're pretty filling and healthy.

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Bananas have been so overly genetically modified (GMO) to help in growth, appearance, cultivation and transportation that they are now able to be a mainstream fruit. Add to that the massive political and civil disruption within the producing countries to protect economic interests and you have nanas for everyone!