Pineapples - The Well-Traveled Tropical Fruit (Good for You, Too!)

Pineapples. Members of the Bromeliad family.

Pineapples are from Hawaii, right? 

Well, now you can get them there--but they are originally from south Brazil and Paraguay--where they were native before the local tribes and exploring Europeans started moving them around.

The local natives found them useful for trade with other tribes, so pineapples spread as a fruit source through South and Central America to the West Indies before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492.

Columbus brought the fruit back to Spain in 1493 after finding the plant on the Carribean island of Guadalupe.



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From then on, the pineapple spread around the world on Spanish and Portuguese sailing ships as a scurvy preventative.  The Spanish fleet eventually introduced the plant to the Philippines and Guam (when Magellan's fleet circumnavigated the world in 1521).

Although some historians think that pineapples could have arrived on the Hawaiian islands as early as 1527 on Spanish sailing ships from the New World--other historians theorize that pineapples arrived on the Hawaiian islands, when Francisco de Paula Marin, a Spanish horticultural experimenter arrived in Hawaii in 1794, after being forced onto a sailing ship from the Spanish port of San Francisco, California province, in the New World.

Marin became a friend and advisor to King Kamehameha I and is recorded to have experimented with growing pineapples on the islands in the early 1800s.

During this time, the Europeans also worked on cultivating fruits with more desirable characteristics and introduced the pineapples to Australia and other parts of the world.

Pineapples had reached England in 1660 and because they didn't grow well in the colder European climates, they were eventually grown in greenhouses by 1720.

After Captain James Cook's fleet stumbled over the Hawaiian islands in 1778 and the islands became a regular stopping point for whaling ships--which would frequently carry pineapples as a scurvy preventative--some of the pineapples may have also made their way ashore to become a popular fruit on the Hawaiian islands.

They were first recorded by Andre Thevenet in 1555 to be called "nana" (from which their Genus name, "Ananas", is derived), which means "excellent fruit" in the Tupi language (tribe which lived around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).  European explorers thought the fruit looked a lot like pinecones and its flesh resembled that of an apple... thus the name, "pineapple".

By the 1950s, Hawaii was the top producer of pineapples in the world--growing more than 80% of the world's supply. This crop was second only to Hawaii's production of sugar cane at that time.

However, rising costs of labor have reduced both crops since that peak in the 1950s, when the Dole plantation alone had more than 20,000 pineapple-producing acres and more than 1000 workers--there had been eight pineapple growing companies on the islands--the production of pineapples has been steadily falling. Hawaii has lost its standing in pineapple production to China, Thailand, the Philippines, and Brazil, the combination of which produce about 50% of the world's pineapple crop today. 

Hawaii's production now barely reaches about 2% of the world's crop, although Hawaii is still the largest producer of U.S.--consumed pineapples. The only other state that grows pineapples is Florida, but their gross production is negligible.