I don't even know why I'm writing this right now, but... I just peeled a banana. And, naturally, ate it.
And I peeled it the way it's shown in the photo. That is, I snapped off the "tail" (or whatever else you might call the bit that attaches the banana to the bunch), and part of the peel came away with it, and so on. But I remember very well that in childhood, and generally "back in Soviet times" (the USSR), bananas were not peeled like that. You'd bite off the tip of the peel (I never once saw anyone cut it off), and then tear away a strip from each side. In other words, people peeled them the way cartoon monkeys do. And nobody ever snapped off the "tail." At least, I never saw that happen even once. And if I had, it would have given me culture shock. And only now have I realized that I peel bananas in some kind of non-Russian way. And everyone around me does too. How did that happen? And you can't even say that we "relearned" how to peel them. It's practically at the level of an unconditioned reflex. You take a banana and peel it. In the USSR, in the Russian Federation, or in Zanzibar. It's all very strange and suspicious. Maybe I should file a complaint with the prosecutor's office, just in case? P.S. Apparently I'm not the only one preoccupied with this question. Google turned up an image like this.