The Pineapple
An edible history.
In September of 2022 I found myself in Portugal, at a rather fancy restaurant, in the northern city of Porto, eating a decidedly not-fancy, though entirely delicious dessert; a single slice of pineapple.
I had come to Portugal to visit one of my best friends who was living in Lisbon. We hadn’t seen each other since the pre-pandemic times of January of 2020, so during a two-day visit to Porto we decided to treat ourselves to a celebratory meal at Rogério do Redondo (one of Bourdain’s top Porto recs). It’s a traditional Portuguese restaurant serving classics in a dining room that felt, to my Millennial Brooklyn gaze, a bit like a midtown steakhouse. The food was phenomenal. We started with a Serra de Estrela cheese, a wheel whose top rind is sliced off, creating a cavernous vessel of soft gooey cheese you slather on your bread. We ate lightly battered cod drizzled in lemon juice, steak, and red wine from the Douro region. By dessert, we were stuffed. But still craving something sweet, we settled on the simplest looking option, simply titled “Pineapple.” And that is exactly what we got.
No garnish, no sauce, no tricks. Just a slice of pineapple in the center of a white porcelain plate. And honestly, it was the perfect end to such an indulgent meal. When we returned to Lisbon and regaled friends with our Porto food diaries, I mentioned the singular slice of pineapple for dessert – which for some reason I just couldn’t stop thinking about. A Portuguese friend explained, “For a long time Portugal was so poor, that a simple piece of fruit like this was a delicacy.”
So of course, that got me thinking. How did pineapples go from being an exotic treat to a supermarket staple? And where exactly do pineapples even come from in the first place?
The pineapple hails from South America. Specifically, an area that covers modern day southern Brazil and northern Paraguay. It was voraciously consumed by the people indigenous to these regions, and the plant spread through South America, into Central America and parts of the Caribbean. People like the Nambikwara, who are from the Rondônia state in southern Brazil, used the pineapple to make juices and a very strong fermented drink called nanaî, from their name for the fruit, naná (which is where the French word for pineapple, ananas, derives). These pineapples would have been much smaller than the steroid-pumped Doles we know today. They were cultivated and farmed – but they also grew wild in fields.
Then in 1493, on his second voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus encountered the pineapple on the island of Guadeloupe – and the fate of the fruit was forever changed. He called it the “Pine of the Indies,” cause, well, I suppose it does look somewhat like a pinecone – but also because Columbus was still very much convinced he was in some Western part of India, hence the “West Indies.”
The journey the pineapple would take from the Americas, by European hands, was vast; a multilane ocean highway shooting out in nearly every direction imaginable. In the 16th century, the world’s introduction to the pineapple was largely facilitated by the Spanish and the Portuguese – the O.G. European colonizers. Of course, not to be outdone by the Dutch, and then the English, who took the imperial helm in the later 17th and 18th centuries.
Wooden ships, manned by sailors from rural areas of the Iberian peninsula – poor men whose fates only a generation prior would have been landlocked, confined to farming the arid hills of their ancestors – were now writing the very first pages of modern global trade history. Hulls made of European oak, pushed forward through tropical aquamarine seas, carrying fruits, vegetables, plants and flowers never before seen by European, Asian or African eyes.
The Portuguese carried the pineapple to St. Helena in 1505, Madagascar in 1548, southern India in 1550, Manila in 1565, southern China in 1594, and Guinea in West Africa in 1602. The Spanish introduced the spiky fruit to Singapore in 1637, Taiwan in 1650, and Assam, Burma and Thailand in 1700.
In warm Asian and African climates, the pineapple thrived, and the fruit was readily adopted into local diets wherever it was introduced. In Europe, however, particularly as the continent faced its Little Ice Age during the Medieval period, the pineapple struggled to grow – making it an inherently rare foreign fruit.
Enthusiastic botanists had to find ways to recreate the hot and humid temperatures the pineapple was used to in its tropical homeland. Hothouses were built, essentially 17th century greenhouses, kept warm by cutting edge period technology like burning manure.
Under gray English skies and stormy Dutch clouds, the gnarly yellow fruits emerged from their pots. Careful cultivation produced a sweet delicacy only the ultra-wealthy could afford. A single pineapple could fetch thousands – roughly equivalent to $8,000 today. Quite the difference from the $3.99 pineapples available at my local supermarket.
We know that when something is expensive and hard to get a hold of, it makes people want it more. Humans like rare things. They covet them. They go to extraordinary lengths to get them. If an aristocratic English family, desiring a pineapple to serve their esteemed guests, did not have a few thousand pounds lying around to purchase one, they could rent a pineapple for said dinner party as a centerpiece. Not to be consumed of course, and quickly returned intact the next morning. Turns out Rent The Runway isn’t an entirely new concept.
As a result of the pineapple’s elite status in 17th, 18th and even 19th century Europe, we find the fruit in some rather strange places. Go to London and stand in front of the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral and you will see golden pineapples atop her towers. Travel north to Scotland, to Dunmore House and you will find a giant 18th century pineapple hothouse. Pineapple shaped ceramics became popular, as did pineapple decorations on dresses, shoes, and even pineapple shaped purses. So valuable was the pineapple that in 1807, when an Englishman named John Godding stole seven pineapples from his employer, he was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in Australia.
Of course one cannot talk about the pineapple’s journey from Brazil to the rest of the world, without talking about colonialism. The indigenous foods of the Americas became known to the rest of the world along painful avenues of slavery and genocide. The sweet yellow flesh enjoyed by white women in corsets in grand houses, masked the horrors of extraction. The same can be said of sugar. Or potatoes, tomatoes, chilis, and cacao. Today, the same could really be said of a hamburger. But we don’t like to think about these inconvenient truths.
Perhaps the final stage of the pineapple’s journey from fruit indigenous to the Americas to globally consumed vitamin C-packed superstar - took place in Hawaii. The fruit arrived in the Pacific island archipelago in 1813 via the Spanish. Towards the end of the 19th century the first commercial pineapple farms began to crop up. Land was stolen from the Hawaiian people and a plantation system was established; one which exploited local and foreign “imported” labor. Almost overnight Hawaii became the biggest pineapple producer in the world.
And then in 1900, a man named James Dole arrived in Hawaii. Yup, that Dole. The “Pineapple King” established The Hawaiian Pineapple Company, which later became the Dole Food Company and priced his fruit so low almost everyone else went out of business. His pineapple plantations came to produce 75% of the world’s pineapple crop. Along with the invention of canning and airplanes, pineapple became a mass produced – and mass consumed – fruit. Dole is now one of the largest producers of fruit and vegetables on planet Earth.
Today the pineapple is the one of the most consumed fruits in the world. Think of Mexican al-pastor tacos with little chunks of charred pineapple. Taiwanese Pineapple Cake served with a cup of tea. A 1950s American ham, gracing the Sunday table, adorned in pineapple medallions. Think of Khao Pad Sapparod, a Thai fried rice dish laced with pineapple. Think of the Pina Colada! God, even Hawaiian Pizza. (As a born and raised New Yorker, I cannot condone this monstrosity. Though I will concede, it embodies perhaps one of the most fascinating global food fusion stories out there: pizza from Italy, tomatoes from Mexico, pineapple from Brazil, birthed through Greek-Canadian pizzaiolo hands and now Austrialians’ favorite pizza topping? Apparently even Hawaiian Pizza contains multitudes.)
This is what I love about food history. Behind every ingredient, every dish, there are countless stories. There are big stories – of empire and global trade. There are tales of consumption – how people define taste, how people experience taste. There are smaller stories – of individuals weaving pineapple fibers together to make a basket in 13th century Brazil, of a 17th Parisian potter creating a pineapple shaped ceramic bowl, of a 20th century Greek immigrant, newly arrived in Canada – setting his eyes upon a seemingly exotic fruit, mind spinning, ideas whirling, and deciding to put it a top a pizza.
Welcome to the Edible History newsletter. I hope I’ll see you next week for another, edible history.
Edible History is a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I will now think about renting all kinds of foods! Thanks for that fun fact about pineapples.