Imagine paying the price of a small house for a single piece of fruit, and then, rather than eating it, carrying it under your arm to dinner parties as a badge of wealth until it rotted. In eighteenth-century Britain this was not a fantasy but a recognised social practice. The pineapple, exotic and almost impossibly difficult to grow in a cold northern climate, became the ultimate status symbol of the Georgian age — so precious that people who could not afford to buy one would rent one for the evening, display it as the crowning ornament of the table, and return it the next day to be hired out again. The fruit was for showing, not eating.
The impossible fruit
The pineapple was unknown in Europe until Christopher Columbus and his crew encountered it in the Caribbean in the 1490s, on the island of Guadeloupe. Sweet, dramatic in appearance and unlike anything grown in Europe, it captivated those who tasted it, but it presented a maddening problem: it grew only in the tropics, it did not survive long sea voyages well, and it could not simply be cultivated in the European climate. For nearly two centuries a pineapple in Europe was a great rarity, imported at enormous expense and often arriving spoiled.
Then European gardeners, with vast expenditure of money and ingenuity, learned to grow pineapples at home in specially built heated greenhouses known as "pineries" and "stoves," which maintained tropical warmth through cold northern winters using furnaces, fermenting tanbark and later hot-water pipes. Growing a single pineapple this way might take years and demand the constant attention of skilled gardeners burning fuel around the clock. The result was a fruit of extraordinary cost. A homegrown pineapple could command the equivalent of thousands of pounds in today's money, a sum that placed it far beyond ordinary reach and squarely in the realm of aristocratic display.
The fruit you rented
Because a pineapple cost so much and signalled such wealth, an entire culture of conspicuous display grew up around it. To set a pineapple at the centre of one's dinner table was to announce, unmistakably, that one possessed either the estate to grow such a thing or the fortune to buy it. Those who had neither but wished to seem as though they did could hire a pineapple for the occasion. Enterprising sellers rented the same fruit out repeatedly, passing it from party to party, where it presided over the table as a centrepiece, admired but untouched. A pineapple might make the rounds of many gatherings, growing steadily softer and more battered, before finally being sold at last, at a lower price, to someone wealthy enough to actually eat it. The fruit's value lay almost entirely in what it said about its owner.
The pineapple's prestige seeped into art and architecture, leaving monuments that outlasted the fashion. A celebrated painting from around 1675 depicts the royal gardener John Rose presenting King Charles II with a pineapple, a scene that fixed the fruit's association with royalty and status in the British imagination. Wealthy landowners had pineapples carved as finials atop their gateposts and buildings, a stone pineapple serving as a silent boast of hospitality and affluence. The most extravagant survival is the Dunmore Pineapple in Scotland, a garden building of the 1760s topped by an enormous, elaborately carved stone pineapple rising above its walls — one of the most eccentric structures in Britain and a perfect emblem of the age's pineapple mania. The potter Josiah Wedgwood, alert as ever to fashion, produced pineapple-shaped ceramics, moulding teapots and tableware in the form of the coveted fruit.
From luxury to loose change
The pineapple's reign as a symbol of the unattainable could not survive the collapse of its scarcity. In the nineteenth century, faster steamships and the growth of large-scale plantation agriculture in the tropics brought fresh pineapples to Europe in quantity, and the arrival of canned pineapple, produced industrially from Hawaiian and other plantations around the turn of the twentieth century, made the fruit cheap and available to almost everyone. As supply exploded, the pineapple tumbled from the heights of aristocratic display to the shelves of the ordinary grocer. Within a few generations it fell from a rented centrepiece worth a fortune to a common tinned fruit, poured over gammon and set in jelly at children's parties.
The pineapple's story is a parable of how status is manufactured. There was nothing intrinsically noble about the fruit; its prestige came entirely from its scarcity and the labour required to grow it. Make it abundant, and the aura evaporates. The Georgian gentleman parading his rented pineapple and the modern shopper tossing a tin into a trolley are holding, in essence, the same fruit — separated only by the economics of supply, which turned an object worth a house into an object worth loose change.
Quiz nuggets
- Europeans first encountered the pineapple when Columbus's expedition reached Guadeloupe in the 1490s.
- In Georgian Britain, homegrown pineapples cost the equivalent of thousands of pounds and were grown in heated greenhouses called "pineries."
- Because of their cost, pineapples were often rented as dinner-party centrepieces and displayed rather than eaten.
- A famous painting of around 1675 shows royal gardener John Rose presenting a pineapple to King Charles II; the Dunmore Pineapple in Scotland (1760s) is a stone monument to the craze.
- Steamships and canned pineapple from Hawaiian plantations made the fruit cheap and common by the early twentieth century.