When and how did the banana, a tropical fruit, become so pedestrian in Euro-American diets? It seems like it would have been an exotic signature of colonial import, but nowadays it's a basic fruit alongside apples and oranges (from the standpoint of northern hemisphere, western, eaters).
The story of the banana is inextricably bound to the modern history of Central America.
To very briefly answer your question, the banana is one of the few tropical fruits that can a) bear fruit rapidly (plant a banana tree and you'll have bananas in two years or less) and b) survive a long transport in stable and tasty condition (bananas take a few weeks to ripen).
Bananas took off in popularity in the US in the late 19th century, when shipping and rail grew cheap enough that bananas grown in, say, Honduras plantations could be picked and shipped to New York City and sold cheaper by weight than apples. This was immensely profitable for the mostly foreign banana barons.
Early banana entrepreneurs soon struck deals with Central American government officials to acquire public lands and build railways and ports and communication networks and suppress efforts to start up unions. In 1928, the United Fruit Company forced the government of Colombia to gun down striking banana plantation workers. Fruit companies also lobbied the US government to overthrow banana-unfriendly local governments (see for example the Guatemalan coup of 1954).
In sum, a combination of the banana's natural properties, the evolving technologies of transport, and a cheap workforce easily exploited with the collusion of corrupt local plutocrats, made mass banana cultivation in central America immensely profitable.
Source:
Koeppl 2009 - Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World