Description

Would you pay eight-thousand dollars to impress your friends with a pineapple? No? Well, the Victorians did.

Show Notes:

Pineapples everywhere
image: Derek Harper
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode





Dunmore Pineapple house built in Scotland in 1761
The building had a hothouse that was used for growing pineapples!
image: PeakPX.com

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to the Brain Junk, I’m Amy Barton and I’m Trace Kerr and it’s time for a Brain Storm and we’re going to be talking about one of Amy’s favorite things.
AB: I hope it’s, it’s gotta be something flatulence related.
TK: No, it’s pineapples.
AB: Oh, I do love pineapple.
TK: I know you do. I was thinking of your pineapple cardi the whole time. So pineapples have been used as decorations. I can remember when I was a kid going to an older house and there were pineapples in the railing down at the end. There was a pineapple at the end and I thought, well that’s an odd choice. Well, I’m going to tell you why they became popular.
AB: Excellent.
TK: And the background behind pineapple renting, pineapple renting.
AB: Oh, I look forward to this.
TK: So first we’re going to go back and pineapples were discovered. By Columbus, he discovered a lot of stuff, found these pineapples on the island of Guadalupe in 1493 and pineapple slowly started coming back to Europe. Now it was a long boat trip, so there weren’t very many. They often rotted. Well, people got pineapple fever.
AB: Oh yeah.
TK: They were obsessed with the unobtainable because you know, there were so few of them that they were super novel. Right. Okay. In the 16 hundreds, most pineapples came to Europe and the U S on ships. So they were super expensive. For example, in America, pineapples were imported from the Caribbean. And in today’s dollars one pineapple would cost $8,000.
AB: Oh my goodness. That is like three of my Buick.
TK: I know. Let’s see. Buy a car or get a pineapple. So yeah. So King James had his first bite of Pineapple in 1625 and declared that the pineapple must have been the apple that eve tempted Adam to sin with because it was that good. He had one bite and he was raptured over the moon by this fruit. It was that good. And Catherine the Great Louis the 15th James the second, were huge fans of the fruit. So you’ve got the upper, upper, upper crust getting to have these one or two that come over on the boats. Uh, there’s even a painting from 1675 that shows king James the second receiving what is supposed to be the first pineapple grown on English soil. Yes. There’s like the gardeners down on one knee and he’s holding a rather diminutive pineapple. Actually. It’s not like the dull ones that we see in the grocery store, but in the king is like, Oh yes. That’s nice. Thank you. You know, he has a very kind of droll expression on his face, but what about the middle classes and like the upper classes because he used it for a long, yeah. Well, you know, you’ve never had it but you want that uh, status because they became a real symbol of richness. It’s like the Victorian England’s version of the Birkin bag.
AB: Yes. You know that they need to grow in a tropical climate, don’t they?
TK: Yes, they do. So you couldn’t until they, they figured out hothouses and greenhouses, which we will get to there. It was almost impossible. So if you wanted to show off to your friends this cool status symbol and you didn’t want to break the bank, you would rent a pineapple. So think about it. You’re a merchant and the ship comes in and you’ve got lik...

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