Food & Consequences: Pineapple Expre$$
Some of the most expensive fruits in the world are the £10,000 pineapples grown at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, England. They aren’t actually for sale; £10,000 is what gardeners estimate each one might fetch at a charity auction. The high price is a function of high latitude. Cornwall has mild winters, but it’s a lot closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to the Tropic of Cancer. The Lost Gardens sit at fifty degrees north—the same latitude as Kiev and northern Newfoundland, farther north than any point in the contiguous United States—and yet the pineapples are grown without space heaters or humidifiers, or any electricity at all.
The English have led the world in pineapple appreciation ever since they first encountered the fruit in the Caribbean. In his mid-seventeenth-century travel narrative, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, Richard Ligon devotes a long, rapturous passage to the “Pine,” which contains “all that is excellent in a superlative degree, for beauty and taste.” But pineapples are tropical fruits, and before the age of steam there was no way to get them across the ocean before they rotted. Since the plants take about eighteen months to bear fruit, they can’t be grown as annuals in cold climates. And so, in order to grow the fruit at home, the English adapted an exceptionally clever Dutch method called the “pineapple pit” (or pineapple stove, or pinery-vinery). One of these structures was unearthed at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in 1991, and today it is the only active pineapple pit in the world....MORE
