King of fruits

In 2020, an odd food product hit the shelves of North American supermarkets, courtesy of the agrofood company Del Monte. 

It was a new type of pineapple, called the ‘Pinkglow’, notable for the color of its flesh: not the typical yellow, but a striking pink. It retailed for $49, ten or twenty times as much as a regular pineapple. 

The hefty price tag was justified by the Pinkglow’s long development time. Del Monte claims it spent 16 years genetically engineering it. As a 2012 patent describes, the unusual color comes from overexpressing one enzyme and suppressing others so that the naturally occurring red pigment lycopene (think of tomatoes, watermelons, or pink grapefruit) accumulates in the pineapple flesh instead of being converted to yellower substances like beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin. 

But mostly, the Pinkglow is expensive because it is a luxury product. Del Monte’s marketing makes this abundantly clear: the product’s website calls it ‘the jewel of the jungle’ and explicitly encourages consumers to post pictures of it on social media.

It seems silly, doesn’t it? Nobody needed a pink pineapple. Whatever resources Del Monte poured into its development bought precious little for the welfare of humanity: a mere curiosity. Couldn’t we have just gone on enjoying regular yellow pineapples indefinitely?

Perhaps. But it may be useful to remember that the yellow pineapple that we can buy in any supermarket is, itself, the product of many careers’ worth of work. In fact, for centuries, the ‘ordinary’ pineapple was a supremely expensive luxury item in Europe, fit for the early modern equivalent of posting social media pictures (displaying the fruit at dinner parties among aristocrats). It is only because its prestige drove many technical and commercial innovations that the pineapple became commonplace. Del Monte’s pink pineapple is only the latest in a long series of experimentations to make the fruit as tasty and widely available as possible. 

A brief history of the pineapple’s rise to fame

The bromeliads are a family of plants native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. Only one is of agricultural importance: Ananas comosus, the pineapple, which still grows today in its original habitat, the tropical forests of what is now Paraguay and southern Brazil. The wild type is small and full of seeds, but that did not prevent the local Tupi-Guarani peoples from domesticating it starting perhaps 6,000 years ago.¹

The innovations that allowed for this process are poorly understood but would have involved selection for low fiber content, fewer seeds (and, therefore, the asexual vegetative propagation necessary today), and lower production of the bromelain enzyme, which degrades protein (and is why pineapple can be used to tenderize meat). We do know that the pineapple spread far and wide across indigenous America, possibly all the way north to the Maya and Aztec homelands in Mexico. Notably, it was cultivated by the Caribs on the island of Guadeloupe, which is where Christopher Columbus was to land near the beginning of his second voyage in 1493, making him and his men the first Europeans to encounter the fruit. 

With its unique appearance and extremely sweet taste, the pineapple was an immediate sensation among the crew. At the end of his expedition, Columbus stopped at Guadeloupe again and stocked up on pineapples to bring back to Spain. Sadly, over the seven-week-long trip back, all of his specimens rotted, save one. Columbus hastened to court to present it to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. As told by the chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, the king declared that he preferred this fruit ‘to all others’. The pineapple had received a glowing royal endorsement within days of its arrival in Europe. 

Over the next couple of centuries, as Europeans conquered and settled the Americas, a variety of people wrote of the pineapple, almost always in eulogistic terms. In his 1535 book on New Spain, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes interrupts his sober analysis with a six page hagiography to the pineapple with passages such as ‘My pen and my words cannot depict such exceptional qualities’, or ‘To taste it is so appetizing a thing, so delicate, that words fail to give it its true praise for this.’

Given that this was a typical reaction to tasting the fruit, it is unsurprising that the pineapple soon piqued the interest of wealthy aristocrats. There was, however, a major problem. Pineapples are non-climacteric: they do not ripen after harvest. They must be picked when perfectly mature, which means right before they start to decay. Before the development of steam-powered transport in the nineteenth century, ships were too slow to import ripe pineapples, so the only option for the curious aristocrat was to travel to the colonies – or to try to grow the fruit at home since fruitless live plants could survive a transatlantic trip. 

But pineapple is a demanding crop. It takes two to three years for a plant to yield a single fruit, and those two to three years must be spent in constant tropical temperatures – quite the challenge in early modern Europe. 

Many tried anyway. The first person to succeed may have been Agnes Block, a horticulturist and art collector in the Netherlands, in around 1685. To commemorate her achievement, she commissioned a medal saying: ‘Fert arsque laborque quod natura negat’, meaning ‘art and labor bring about what nature cannot’. 

Mirroring this competition with Nature itself, there was also a competition among the gardening-inclined rich. It soon became a must for an English gentleman to build, at great expense, a ‘pineapple pit’ on his estate. For the professional gardener, to succeed at maturing a pineapple was a top sign of competence. In France, the pineapple became a court favorite at Versailles after the first homegrown pineapples were presented to Louis XV in 1733.

All this competitive pressure spurred on technological innovation. Perhaps starting with Amsterdam’s botanical gardens in 1682, hothouses (heated greenhouses) began to appear in Europe during the 1680s to grow exotic plants from the colonies. Improvements in glass manufacturing, thermometers (mercury-in-glass thermometers were invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in the 1710s), heat sources (such as tanner’s bark, a powder made from tree bark in the tanning industry that slowly releases heat as it decomposes), and hothouse design (for instance, the addition of chimney flues) appeared in a steady trickle throughout this period. 

By the late eighteenth century, ‘pineries’, as pineapple gardens were called, had become a regular feature of large European estates. The fruit had gone from being a rare curiosity to become an expensive but attainable luxury, at least for the wealthy. It became common practice to display a fresh pineapple at dinner parties to impress guests. This led to delightfully absurd situations: the pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A  pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves. 

At the height of this pineapple mania, it became a symbol of decadence and excess as shown by satirical cartoons.

One can still notice the fruit’s nineteenth century legacy in architectural and decorative elements from that period, most strikingly at the Dunmore Pineapple hothouse in Scotland. It would take several more innovations to turn the king of fruits into an ordinary commodity. 

Steamships, cans, and refrigerators: how the pineapple went from aristocratic to mundane

The engineer George Stephenson was a key figure in the Industrial Revolution. Hailed as ‘the father of railways’, he built the first locomotive that hauled a passenger train on a public railway in 1825 with his son Robert. Twenty years later, he retired and devoted himself to his other passion: gardening. To compete with his friend, the renowned gardener Joseph Paxton, he built himself a 68-foot-long pine house and a separate 140-foot-long pine pit at his home.

But Stephenson’s efforts came during the last stages of the pineapple mania era. As standards of living rose, buoyed by new technology, farmers and merchants saw the money-making potential of bringing the aristocratic pineapple to a wider audience. 

Thus, in 1764, at the peak of pineapple mania in England, it is estimated that the average cost to cultivate a pineapple – taking into account the construction of the pinery, the import of pineapple plants from the Caribbean, and the gardening labor for three or four years – was approximately £80. This translates to about £12,000, or $16,000, today. By the time of Stephenson’s retirement in the 1840s, cartoons show that in London even the lower classes could try a pineapple slice for a mere penny, about the price of a large loaf of bread.

What happened? First and foremost, imports. While the British, Dutch, and French elites obsessed over hothouse designs for their pineries, the pineapple had, of course, been growing easily in tropical regions. The West Indies, in particular, became a large provider to North America, to the delight of gentlemen like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Starting in the 1820s, and even more so in the 1830s, steamship transport finally allowed transatlantic imports to reach Europe after a mere two to four weeks of travel – fast enough for ripe pineapples to survive the voyage. A company named Keeling and Hunt shipped 1,000 pineapples from the Bahamas to Liverpool in 1842. Most of the shipment was then transferred to London by rail, thanks to Stephenson’s work. 

Less than a decade later, in 1850, ‘200,000 pineapples had been imported in the space of just three months’. The Bahamas was the main source, along with other West Indian islands like Antigua and St. Bartholomew, and farther afield corners of the Empire like Sierra Leone. In the 1870s, the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores would become the main pineapple exporter to Europe. 

There was still a major limitation: even in the tropics, pineapples ripen only in summer. European-grown pineapples, since they were planted indoors, were available year-round. So for a time, English pineapples, by then cultivated as a cottage industry of pineries all over the country, kept a competitive advantage. In 1845, they became even cheaper when the glass tax was repealed, making greenhouses less costly. Caribbean pineapples were also deemed cheap, small, and ‘mostly ill-grown’. 

But this couldn’t and didn’t last. A chance discovery in the Azores in 1874 – that burning dead leaves in a greenhouse releases ethylene gas, which makes pineapples flower – allowed farmers to induce pineapple flowering on demand and ‘provide fruits for the high-value holidays of Christmas, New Year and Easter’.

Then came refrigerated transport. In 1881, the Dunedin served as a proof of concept for refrigerated ships, successfully transporting a full cargo of meat from New Zealand to England. Refrigerated train cars appeared a bit earlier. Within a few years, fresh produce from all over the world could reach Britain and Europe, and the pineapple market was quickly flooded. 

Concurrently, another innovation greatly facilitated access to pineapples: cans. By the second half of the century, pineapple canning factories began to spring up in cultivation locales like the Bahamas and Southeast Asia. In the 1890s, with the invention of George Zastrow’s  ‘machine for treating pineapples’, the premier pineapple canning location moved to Baltimore. The city produced hundreds of thousands of cases, and the fruit was ‘gradually being looked upon more as a necessity than, as heretofore, a luxury’.

A sign of the wide availability of pineapples was the multiplication of recipes for preparing it. Initially, the proper way to eat a pineapple was to cut it into slices and serve it plain so that diners could savor the fruit – like it was a fine wine or cheese. But as pineapples reached the middle and lower classes, recipe books began providing instructions for preserved pineapple, pineapple pies, pineapple fritters, or pineapple chips.

Meanwhile, gardening publications stopped treating growing pineapples as an impressive feat of skill. According to an expert in an 1866 issue of the Journal of Horticulture, ‘no secret was involved in the matter [of growing pineapples], and no extraordinary management was necessary to attain a moderate degree of success; but that the whole affair was one of pocket’.

The great twentieth-century cheapening of the pineapple

Around the turn of the twentieth century entrepreneurs realized that steamship transport, refrigeration, and canning could be combined into a new business opportunity. 

The first person to understand this was a young man named James Dole. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in agriculture, Dole moved to Honolulu in 1899 (it helped that his cousin, Sanford D. Dole, had been president of the short-lived Republic of Hawaii and now held the position of the first governor of the US territory of Hawaii). He bought a farm, experimented with some crops, and settled on the pineapple. In 1901, he formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (today known as Dole), and by 1903, he was shipping canned pineapple to the mainland US. His success was quickly imitated by other businesses, notably by the California Packing Corporation, now known as Del Monte. 

In the next three decades Hawaiian pineapple production skyrocketed. This was due in part to Hawaii’s climate, where the pineapple plantations grew to be the largest in the world. Famously, the island of Lanai, the sixth-largest of the archipelago, was turned into an island-wide plantation for Dole in the 1920s.

Then came technical innovations in processing. In 1911, James Dole hired the engineer Henry Gabriel Ginaca to build a machine that would ‘automatically center the pineapple on the core, cut out a fruit cylinder, eradicate the crushed and juice material from the outer skin, cut off the ends and remove the central fibrous core’. This allowed the processing of pineapples for canning to rise from 10–15 fruits per minute to about 50. Further improvements to the Ginaca machine during the twentieth century increased that number to 75 per minute, and Ginaca’s design is still the main way we process pineapples today.

But the most notable innovation of the period was not technical: it was cultural. The pineapple in the early twentieth century was in somewhat of an ambiguous cultural spot. It still carried a bit of its erstwhile prestige, which limited sales to housewives who couldn’t justify it as an everyday expense (especially when the Great Depression hit). At the same time, it was mostly available in canned form, which was the object of elite prejudice: an 1884 author complained of ‘piles of gaudy canisters that embalm every constituent of a dinner, from the soup to the pineapple’.

To counter these problems of perception, the Hawaiian pineapple companies spared no effort at marketing their product to the masses, capitalizing on images of tropical paradise. They also benefited from both world wars, when the militaries of the Allied powers bought enormous quantities of canned pineapple to send as rations to soldiers. Suddenly, many more people had become acquainted with the king of fruits.

Propelled by these marketing successes, the Hawaiian production of canned pineapple rose steadily before and after the Great Depression until it peaked in 1957. After this, the archipelago’s industry experienced a decline as production relocated to countries such as Thailand or the Philippines. The last Hawaiian cannery closed in 2007. Yet Hawaiian pineapple left an enduring legacy in the form of companies like Dole and Del Monte as well as cultural associations. Pizza with pineapple as a topping is called ‘Hawaiian’, despite having nothing to do with Hawaii.

Today we produce about 30 million tons of pineapple worldwide every year, especially in Costa Rica, Southeast Asia, and the pineapple’s homeland of Brazil – and very little in the places that served as the main settings of its history, including Hawaii, the Bahamas, the Azores, and northern Europe. 

And innovation has not stopped. Before it created the Pinkglow, Del Monte released the Gold variety (also known as MD-2) in 1996. The Gold, being sweeter, yellower, and easier to grow, replaced the Smooth Cayenne as the most common cultivar and is credited for more than doubling fresh pineapple consumption in both the US and the UK. 

Progress and the uses of luxury

While it is obviously a good thing that the pineapple is now widely accessible, people still feel something has been lost with its fall from grace. Such conflicting attitudes have accompanied the pineapple throughout its history. In the nineteenth century, it was still a recognizable luxury and an object of desire, and yet it couldn’t quite fulfill this role now that anyone could get a slice of the tropics for one penny. O’Connor writes of the Victorian paradox of progress: ‘The aim of scientific and economic progress was the betterment of the human condition, but any gains challenged established social hierarchies . . . The elite felt threatened by the new middle class, which in turn felt threatened by the rising working poor’. The pineapple was the perfect luxury good to illustrate this, and indeed, Victorian authors sometimes used it as a direct metaphor for social and technological progress.²

To understand what happened, it’s useful to think about what luxury even is. Most luxury goods have intrinsic desirable qualities, like the pineapple’s sweet taste. But often, they are luxuries primarily because they are positional goods: their value comes from showing off status. When procuring a pineapple is difficult or costly, displaying one is a strong, unfakeable ‘signal’ of wealth. This, however, increases demand, which gives entrepreneurs like Keeling and Hunt or James Dole an incentive to provide pineapples at a lower price. For a time, the poorer people who can now afford them may benefit from the lingering prestige, but eventually, society catches on, and the prestige vanishes.

Thus luxury is self-defeating: any particular luxury good, unless inherently limited in supply (like historical artifacts or real estate near Central Park), can eventually become mundane. Aluminum used to be more precious than gold and is now common enough to be used in disposable packaging. Purple dye used to be reserved for Roman emperors; now we have cheap ways of manufacturing pigments in any color. Spices, mirrors, ice, citrus fruit, and even celery are all examples of items that used to attract the attention of the wealthiest but have now become widely available at very little cost. All of them are victories for our quality of life. 

If the Pinkglow pineapple seems mildly absurd, its cousin, Del Monte’s Rubyglow pineapple – available in China and North America for a mere $395.99! – seems downright preposterous. It is difficult to imagine how the rise of a new, luxury red-skinned pineapple could benefit the masses. 

But who knows? Perhaps the future will grant us dozens of pineapple colors to choose from, just as we now can select tomatoes, grapes, and citrus fruit in a variety of shapes, flavors, and hues. Small improvements to the taste and appearance of specialty crops are certainly not the most pressing problem in the world, but they make life a little nicer, and cumulatively, that’s worth a lot. After all, the typical eighteenth-century aristocrat was willing to spend a fortune to access the tiniest fraction of the food diversity we take for granted today. They would surely be delighted by the idea of posting pictures of a pink pineapple on their Instagram for everyone to envy.