Pineapples
Thursday, November 28
Today, another quote from the opposite half of a John Green podcast episode I’ve featured before: Hawaiian Pizza and Viral Meningitis:
Pineapples only grow in warm climates. They were introduced to India as early as 1550 but weren't successfully cultivated in Europe until the late 17th century.
Their rarity combined with the challenges and expensive shipping made pineapples ridiculously expensive. At the end of the 18th century, a single pineapple in the Eastern United States could cost $8,000 in today's money. They became symbols of extravagant wealth which is why you'll often see pineapples and paintings commissioned by aristocrats.
They were far too expensive to merely eat of course, as detailed in Francesca Bowman's book, The King of Fruits, the pineapple was mostly used as a table decoration and only eaten once the fruit began to rot.
I’ve sometimes heard it said that the average working-class American today lives in far greater luxury than Medieval kings. It’s not a perfect comparison, but the spirit of the claim seems true to me.
It’s not just the endless, cheap pineapples, and spices, and foods of all varieties. It’s also bedrooms that are warm in the winter and cold in the summer, small metal tubes that transport us around the world in hours, sophisticated dental care and surgical methods and anesthesia.
And it’s not just material things getting cheaper — much of the modern world’s abundance simply didn’t exist hundreds of years ago. There are priceless goods — say, knowledge of what the world looked like at the very beginning of time — accessible to anyone today that were utterly impossible for a Medieval king to posses.
Thanksgiving is a holiday I associate more with food abundance than with gratitude or early America, and we certainly have it in spades. Thanksgiving meals are only possible thanks to modern supermarkets that offer every variety of food, demand-forecasted not to run out (even on the big day), sold to customers at prices equivalent to a fraction of an hour of their labor, accessible 24/7 in all major cities.
So, I’m grateful that I live in a world where, even though I live thousands of miles from a suitable climate to grow pineapples, there are hundreds of them within minutes of me, sold for dollars, avalilable at any hour should I crave them.