54 - When Pineapples Were Status Symbols

For the majority of history they were considered the ultimate delicacy by European nobility who just couldn’t get enough of them. From snack to status symbol, the pineapple has graced many a King and Queens palace courts, while outside of them they took on a mythical quality akin to some sort of precious jewel.

Today, we’ll track the pineapples voyage across the seas and into the history books as it became synonymous with the very peak of royal de rigeour.

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• Sarah Thompson

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Sources for this episode's research:

• https://www.thedailymeal.com/1233796/in-the-1700s-pineapples-were-wildly-expensive-symbols-of-prosperity/
• https://www.britannica.com/plant/pineapple
• https://www.bimstore.co/resources/10-facts-about-pineapples
• https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/a-brief-history-of-foods-pineapple
• https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/25/the-strange-history-of-the-king-pine/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3-uKgiyE3Y
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple#:~:text=Precolonial%20cultivation,-The%20wild%20plant&text=By%20the%20late%201400s%2C%20cropped,it%20into%20India%20by%201550.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-fantastic-history-of-food--3591729/support.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Pineapples are the perfect summertime snack,juicy and delicious, and when you close
your eyes they instantly transport you toa tropical beach on some Caribbean island.
But for the majority of history theywere considered the ultimate delicacy by European nobility
who just couldn't get enough of them. From snack to status symbol, the

(00:21):
pineapple has graced many a king andqueen's palace courts, while outside of them
they took on a rather mythical quality, akin to some sort of precious jewel.
Today we'll track the pineapple's voyage acrossthe seas and into the history books
as it became synonymous with the verypeak of royal dere ago. These are

(00:51):
the bizarre but true stories from historyand in some way involved food. I'm
Nick Charlie Key, and this isthe Fantastic History of Food. Once again,
I wanted to say a huge thankyou to all of my supporters on

(01:15):
Patreon. You help me out somuch in getting this show made, and
today I want to send a specialshout out to my new supporter who joined
since the last episode, Sarah Thompson. Sarah, thank you so much for
joining up and supporting the show.If you would like to support the show
in the same way as Sarah has, it costs just two dollars a month,

(01:36):
and when you sign up, you'llhave your name mentioned in an episode,
just like you've heard today. Butplease, as always, this is
absolutely pressure free, because more thananything, I love the fact that you
just listen to the show and youget some enjoyment out of it, and
that is the basic reason why Ikeep making this show. And as always,
back to the episode, there isno nobler fruit in the universe.

(02:10):
These were the words spoken by Jeande Lay when writing about the pineapple.
He was not alone in his lovefor the tropical fruit, and in fact,
was borderline nonchalant about it when comparedto how a man named Charles Lamb
once described it. Pleasure bordering onpain from the fierceness and insanity of her

(02:31):
relish, like a lover's kisses,She biteth me. But how and why
had these men become so enamored bythis spiky specimen? While as with so
many stories from this time in history, this one finds its inception with one
of Christopher Columbus's voyages back from theAmericas, not the pineapple itself is a

(02:53):
fruit originally native to southern Brazil andParaguay, where they would grow wild along
the banks of the parah on aParaguay river. From there, it spread
throughout South America as it was slowlydomesticated by local people groups. There is
archaeological evidence of pineapples having been cultivatedas early as twelve hundred BC in Peru

(03:14):
and two hundred BC in Mexico,where it was farmed by both the Mayans
and the Aztecs. By the latefourteen hundreds, just in time for Columbus's
arrival, the cultivation of pineapples hadspread so widely that they had become a
staple food stuff in the meso Americandiet. So it was no surprise then
that as Columbus fell in love withthe fruit, he decided he just had

(03:37):
to bring some back to Spain withhim. Now, this was his second
voyage to be exact, and somewheredeep in his ship's cargo hold, amongst
our aforementioned tomatoes from the were Wolfepisode, tobacco, pumpkins, parrots and
entire menagerie of tropical animals, sata small crate of pineapples, and due
to his lack of experience with thefruit and how to handle it. They

(04:00):
unfortunately did not last very long onboard. When they arrived in port and
were unloading their cargo, they foundjust a rotten, sticky mess where once
the crate of pineapples had sat.But in a fortuitous twist of fate,
just one singular pineapple remained intact andcould therefore be presented to King Ferdinand of
Spain as the sole survivor of itstropical brethren, and it was immediately a

(04:25):
smash hit with the King. Hisson's tutor, Peter Marta, even recorded
the King's reaction to tasting it dueto his overwhelming excitement about the fruit.
The most Invincible King Ferdinand relates thathe has eaten yet another fruit brought from
those countries. It is like apine nut in form and color, covered

(04:46):
with scales, and firmer than amelon, but its flavor excels all other
fruits. It was not just deliciousto eat, but it was beautiful to
look at too. King Ferdinand's envoyto Panama wrote of it, it is
the most beautiful of any fruits Ihave seen. I do not suppose there
is in the whole world any otherfruit of so exquisite and lovely an appearance.

(05:10):
In our modern world amidst year roundproduce availability and sugar being crammed into
every possible food stuff, it issometimes easy to forget that at this time
in Renaissance Europe, cane sugar especiallywas an incredibly expensive commodity reserved for the
wealthy. Tasting sweet things in generalwas a luxury, and at the time

(05:30):
fruit was highly seasonal. There wereno commonly eaten sweet foods, so when
the pineapple came along, it musthave been like fireworks going off in their
brains as the sugary sweetness exploded theirdopamine receptors. It's no surprise then that
it was held in such high esteemand would only further be elevated in time

(05:50):
to come. There is an interestingfacet of the pineapple arrival in Europe.
When it did, as told byfran Bowman in her book The Pine,
it coincided with the explosion of thewritten word being spread more broadly throughout the
general populations. In the mid fifteenthcentury alone, more than one hundred and
thirty million books flooded into Europe asanyone with a story to tell began to

(06:15):
write their experiences down, and thisincluded religious texts, and the Bible became
more widely accessible than at any othertime in history, and it soon became
apparent that pineapples were not mentioned anywherein the Bible, or any ancient European
texts for that matter, either,and so they had no pre existing stigmas
attached to them, like so manyother fruits did, the obvious one being

(06:40):
the apple with its connection to thesnake in the garden of Eden. Another
interesting one being the Greek myth ofPersephone and how eating just a handful of
pomegranate seed at the wrong time condemnedher to a life in the underworld alongside
hades. But the pineapple was brandnew to the public consciousness and therefore could
be molded into whatever narrative those inpower chose for it. It was first

(07:02):
named the King of Fruits by theFrench priest Father Dutertre, and in the
centuries that followed it became almost synonymouswith royalty, in no small part thanks
to how its spiky leaves on topresembled a king's crown. Almost all of
the pineapples that were brought to Europewere reserved for consumption by the members of

(07:23):
various royal families, and because ofthis they became somewhat mythologized in popular culture.
Very few people had ever even seena pineapple with their own eyes,
let alone ever had the opportunity totaste one, and this association with royalty
would become a problem for the fruitwhen in sixteen forty two Oliver Cromwell began

(07:43):
his civil war with the monarchy,ultimately leading to the execution of King Charles
the First in sixteen forty nine.To Cromwell, pineapples represented everything he despised
about the royals, who lived,according to him, in insufferable luxury.
There'd be a short lived exile forthe tropical delight until in sixteen sixty Charles
the Second was thrust upon the throne. Known as the Merry Monarch, he

(08:09):
did away with Cromwell's staunch puritanical waysand ushered in dining halls once again laden
with glistening meats, wobbling jellies,and intricate dessert sculptures to be enjoyed by
all in his court. And heleant hard into this persona, milking this
opportunity for all It was worth.He named the fruit the King pine And

(08:30):
in sixteen sixty eight, when aFrench ambassador came to mediate a debit about
Saint KITT's, an island in theCaribbean, Charles had one of his naval
ships bring him a pineapple from oneof their own Caribbean colonies on Barbados.
Once it arrived, he had itperched atop a towering pyramid of fruit brought
into the meeting room once the dinnerhad been finished. And now this was

(08:52):
a not so subtle show of forceto the French ambassador to let him know
that the English were a dominant powerin the region, a sort of ambassadorial
version of the playground Torento, we'vegot pineapples, you don't now. This
was a master's stroke from the King, And as words spread of this power
play, he found himself becoming evenmore and more attached to the pineapple as

(09:13):
a status symbol. He even hada painting of himself commissioned where he is
standing in front of his enormous palacebeing handed a pineapple by one of his
gardeners who is kneeling before him.Now, this was a fanciful concept that
he would use for publicity purposes,as there was no way his gardener could
ever rarely do that because at thetime, pineapples could still not be grown

(09:37):
in Europe's more northerly climates. Europeat this point was a hotbed for political
jockeying, and as England continued toexpand their colonies, it was the Dutch
who were actually hot on their heels. For years, England flaunted the pineapple
as proof of their global reach andsuperiority, but were caught wholly off guard
in sixteen eighty two. It wasat this that the Dutch built the very

(10:01):
first greenhouse, with a cloth merchantby the name of Peter de la Court,
discovering a breakthrough in the pineapple growingprocess, allowing them to produce their
very own home grown crops. NowEnglish nobility was sent into a frenzy upon
learning about this, and their jealousythreatened to bubble over into conflict until a

(10:22):
former English princess married William of Orange, making this Dutch monarch the de facto
king of England. By the middleof the seventeenth century, Britons had figured
out how to grow their own pineapplesas well, which triggered a country wide
pineapple craze. It became a statussymbol for the upper classes to have their
own custom built greenhouses to cultivate theirown pineapples. And this was no small

(10:46):
endeavor, as these so called pineriesneeded twenty four hour care at an almost
never ending supply of coal to keepthe greenhouses at the pineapples preferred tropical temperatures.
Even then, the plants took threeto four years to bloom with their
first fruit, and then each plantonly produced one pineapple per season, so

(11:09):
as you can see, the vastexpense of cultivating these fruits then meant that
once you had one, it becameconsidered wasteful to simply eat it. No,
pineapples had moved to being simply highstatus ornaments to be flaunted by those
wealthy enough to own one. Upperclass women would walk along the high street
simply carrying a pineapple the way modernwomen might carry an expensive designer bag.

(11:33):
They would be passed around from onewoman to another until the pineapple began to
rot. Even then, as themaids would fetch and deliver these pineapples between
their ladies, they had to findingenious ways to conceal them, as if
they were seen on the streets witha pineapple, there was the high risk
that some opportunistic thief may attack themand steal the precious fruit. Some enterprising

(11:56):
businessman even opened a pineapple rental boutique, where for those who didn't quite have
enough money to own their own pineapple, you could simply rent one for the
evening if you were attending a swankyfunction. Now they became so synonymous with
everything good and beautiful that a popularphrase even entered common language, whereby when
someone was describing something as being eitherincredibly valuable or precious, they would say

(12:20):
that it was a pineapple of thefinest flavor. It was even included in
the Georgian era play called The Rivals, where one character compliments another by saying
that he is the very pineapple ofpoliteness. But as globalization took root and
steamships allowed more and more people totravel long distances in relative comfort, such

(12:43):
delicacies as pineapples began to lose theirmythical reputation as being reserved solely for adventurers
and nobility. The final knell inthe upper classes pineapple hoard in coffin came
in the early nineteen hundreds, whenJames Dole launched his mass pineapple plantations in
Hawaii, meaning that for the firsttime in history, pineapple prices became affordable

(13:05):
enough that almost anyone could purchase theirvery own fruit. Nowadays, it's not
at all shocking to see supermarket shellspacked full of whole pineapples or diced up
slices in the refrigerated sections. Theyare so readily available anywhere you shop all
year round that it's almost impossible tofathom how at one point they were the

(13:26):
very pinnacle of high society luxury.So the next time you're at your local
supermarket, why not pick up thismost noble of all fruits and hold it
aloft as you walk back to yourcar, imagining that you too are a
Renaissance era royal. You'll certainly getthe same sorts of stairs from passers by
as they once did, but thistime for a very different reason. This

(14:05):
show is made entirely by me,Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music
having been made by the Enigma thatis the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd
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(14:26):
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and then maybe listen out for yourname in an upcoming episode. So,
until next time, bon apetite,