From aristocratic to mundane

March 22, 2025 4:40 AM

‘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. from King of fruits [Works in Progress]
posted by chavenet (13 comments total)

FTA:
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’

This lady probably sucked, but I love her and want to know more about her.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 5:28 AM on March 22 [3 favorites]

Very good Veblen goods!
posted by rubatan at 5:37 AM on March 22 [2 favorites]

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.

I knew much of this history but I hadn't seen the cost analysis before. That would put pineapple roughly on par with high quality truffles on a per-weight basis, though of course a little truffle goes a long way, flavor-wise. The closest modern equivalent might be something like a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, except without the broad social cachet.
posted by jedicus at 5:55 AM on March 22 [2 favorites]

A botanist friend of mine wants nothing more than to just be allowed to try to make weird colors and shapes of flowers. Well, nothing more than to do that in a free and open lab unhampered by cutthroat intellectual property concerns. I've tried to tell her that Florigene would love her to come develop even more shades of purple and blue, but she doesn't like money, I guess.

The article talks about the commodification of luxury with less moralizing than I'm used to. Nothing wrong with moralizing, of course, but the history of Hawaii's annexation and its connections to the Dole family have been discussed coherently in other venues. This article gave me time to think about my own reaction just aesthetically to the process that moved pineapple from being a luxury product to a lunchbox staple. Uncomfortably, I realized that I was prone to the same attraction to scarcity and expense that drives pineapple to now be seen as kitschy.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 6:00 AM on March 22 [2 favorites]

🍍
posted by HearHere at 6:03 AM on March 22

This sort of piece always spends maybe 1 paragraph on the people and cultures that actually developed the fruit or vegetable in the first place and then 100 on some Europeans with too much time on their hands. See also: potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa, coffee, &c.
I know we live in a Eurocentric world and therefore we only think of things done by Europeans and their descendants as meaningful, but it's tiresome.
posted by signal at 6:13 AM on March 22 [7 favorites]

But not on pizza!
posted by Czjewel at 6:54 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]

I'm just here to say: I fully GET the fuss about pineapples. They are the most goddamn delicious things on this planet.
posted by Dr. Wu at 8:43 AM on March 22 [4 favorites]

Interesting article. They don't mention older varieties; I was shocked on visiting Hawaii to learn about exquisitely sweet and low acidity little white pineapples I had never heard of.
posted by latkes at 8:50 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]

Veblen opportunity, latkes! Of course, voluntary travel might be the more valuable positional good. Hawaii has, as the VCs say, a moat.

Tasting History has a pineapple tart episode .
posted by clew at 9:21 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]

… looking for current varietal knowledge published by people local to any of the places pineapple is grown, but my ability to search for cultivar knowledge in anything but English is terrible. This from Wikipedia is unpromising:

In the US, in 1986, the Pineapple Research Institute was dissolved and its assets divided between Del Monte and Maui Land and Pineapple.

And there was quite recently an ?ipen? database of some important pineapple genetics, described in a scholarly article Moyle Crowe et al 2004, but I can’t find a link to the database’s web interface. (I was expecting a dead one, not none. Maybe it was this?)
posted by clew at 9:38 AM on March 22 [2 favorites]

I love that the place for cultivating a pineapple was a called a pinery. I would sit in my pinery and pine because I don't know what I'm doing and am unable to grow pineapples.
posted by BlueHorse at 10:29 AM on March 22 [3 favorites]

Ananas!

Thus luxury is self-defeating: any particular luxury good, unless inherently limited in supply, 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.

All very interesting but I believe the Durian is currently crowned the King of Fruits, and the Mangosteen is his Queen. Who exactly anoints these regal fruits, I couldn't say. Same fellow who made July 2nd Pineapple Ananas Day?
posted by Rash at 12:58 PM on March 22 [1 favorite]