Is it ethical to eat this pineapple?
A flowchart.
Okay, I’ve been thinking of this article as a flowchart but I don’t think I’m able to write tersely enough for the format. So here’s an enigmatic flowchart followed immediately by explanations and historical anecdotes.
Explanations follow.
Are you in pre-Columbian South America?
If yes, it’s probably fine. Pineapples are native to South America and were easy enough to grow that they became a staple food. My only concern is that it seems like empires in the region often derived their power from growing particularly delicious foods, and many of those empires would conquer, enslave, and sacrifice people. The Aztecs were the original Death by Chocolate.
But there’s little evidence that pineapple, specifically, was ever the key to domination.
Are you Christopher Columbus?
If yes, then it was only ethical the first time. Christopher Columbus, on his second voyage, became the first European to eat pineapple after landing on Guadeloupe in 1493. At the time, he was still following his orders to treat those he encountered like human beings, pending a ruling from the Pope. He came in peace, left behind gifts, and may even have rescued some slaves from the Caribs. Good Columbus! You deserve a treat!
After that, of course, it all went to hell.
Are you in Hawai’i?
Yeah, you’re good. Pineapples came to Hawai’i, indirectly, from conquistadors, but that’s probably not your fault.
Are you in a non-tropical climate before the invention of the steamship and the modern greenhouse?
No. If you eat it, you’re probably a sociopath. As the writer/physician John Moore wrote in 1783,
Two men are standing near a fruit shop in St. James's street. There are some pine-apples within the window, and a poor woman, with an infant crying at her empty breast, without. One of the gentlemen walks in, pays a guinea for a pineapple, which he calmly devours; while the woman implores him for a penny, to buy her a morsel of bread—and implores in vain: not that this fine gentleman values a penny but to put his hand in his pocket would give him some trouble; — the distress of the woman gives him none. The other man happens to have a guinea in his pocket also; he gives it to the woman, walks home, and dines on beef-steaks, with his wife and children.
Without doing injustice to the taste of the former, we may believe that the latter received the greatest gratification for his guinea. You will never convince me, however, that his motive in bestowing it was as selfish as the other's.
At the same time, Amelia Opie was writing her second novel, Adeline Mowbray, which presents the same scenario, but gives it more teeth. The protagonist Adeline, loosely based on Mary Wollstonecraft, agonizes about the decision. Glenmurray, the man she loves, is very sick. While sitting at his bedside, she happens to mention that she saw a pineapple for sale for 2 guineas. Glenmurray, made childish by his high fever, fixates on this and tells her that it’s the only food he could stand eating right now. It’s a lot of money, but she thinks she can get it together, and promises to go buy it.
On the way to the shop, though, guineas in hand, she passes by a poor family in distress. A man is about to be hauled off to debtor’s prison, which might well kill him, since he’s still recovering from a fever himself. His wife has the fever now, and might die without him there to care for her, leaving their son an orphan. Adeline doesn’t know these people, other than from often giving the child sixpence when he’s begging in the street. She could save them on the spot, but it would take all of her money.
She’s promised the pineapple to Glenmurray, and it seems possible that his life might depend on it, since he refuses to eat anything else. She can picture his disappointed face if she comes home empty-handed, almost as vividly as the face of the despairing woman right in front of her. It’s a close thing. If the creditor hadn’t shone up and made a racist comment about the family, it might’ve gone the other way.
“How can I bear to look him in the face!” thought Adeline, lingering on the stairs.
“Adeline, my love! Why do you make me wait so long?” cried Glenmurray. “Here are knives and plates ready; where is the treat I have been so long expecting?”
Adeline entered the room and threw herself on the first chair, avoiding the sight of Glenmurray, whose countenance, as she hastily glanced her eyes over it, was animated with the expectation of a pleasure which he was not to enjoy.
Adeline eventually brings herself to tell the story, dreading his reaction.
When she had finished, Glenmurray was silent; the fretfulness of disease prompted him to say, “So then, to the relief of strangers you sacrificed the gratification of the man whom you love, and deprived him of the only pleasure he may live to enjoy!” But the habitual sweetness and generosity of his temper struggled, and struggled effectually, with his malady; and while Adeline, pale and trembling, awaited her sentence, he caught her suddenly to his bosom, and held her there a few moments in silence.
“Then you forgive me?” faltered out Adeline.
“Forgive you! I love and admire you more than ever! I know your heart, Adeline; and I am convinced that depriving yourself of the delight of giving me the promised treat, in order to do a benevolent action, was an effort of virtue of the highest order; and never, I trust, have you known, or will you know again, such bitter feelings as you this moment experienced.”
Are you in a non-tropical climate during the Industrial Revolution?
Maybe. As people learned to ship them efficiently or grow them in specialized greenhouses known as “pineapple pits,” pineapple prices began to decline relative to the price of other foods.1 But they were still an expensive luxury. It was important, for example, to find out whether a pineapple centerpiece had been purchased for consumption or merely rented as decoration. This was the topic of a popular anecdote about the French actress Rachel Félix, from her long social climb from poor street busker to wealthy mistress of at least three close relatives of Napoleon.
One day, Rachel had several high personages to dine with her…She drove to the door of one of her friends and begged him to accompany her. “I want you to help me choose my dessert,” said she. This friend, who was one of the guests, consented willingly. They stopped at Chevet's.
“I wish for the finest and rarest fruit you have.” She was shown all the impossibilities of the season, and made her choice.
“Would you not like a pineapple for the centre, madame?” said Chevet.
“How do you sell your pineapple?”
“Seventy francs.” It was in 1849 and pines from the Antillas were scarce. “It is too dear, but could you not let me hire it?” Chevet laughed, and, for the honour of his pineapple, consented.
The dinner was superb, for Rachel did things in a grand and princely fashion. Still, there was a little corner which smacked of her origin, of her religion, whose economical predilections had not been eradicated by the education of her childhood. At the dessert rose triumphant the pineapple, much admired as an exotic rarity: the wines were exquisite, the toasts were brilliant, in honour of the divinity of the feast. The friend, seated by the side of the Duke of San Teodoro, said to him “And the pine?” …
The Duke rose, and, armed with a pointed knife, stretched out his arm, leant over the table and carried off the delicate prize on the point of the instrument!
Mlle. Rachel saw the action, and was struck as though a tragic dagger had been plunged into her heart. She uttered a cry, and glanced, like a heroine dying at the fifth act, on the Duke. “Has Mlle. Rachel a pineapple instead of a heart?” said Ponsard.
Are you in a non-tropical climate in the developed world prior to the 1980’s?
Yup, you’re probably good. By the end of the Second Industrial Revolution, pineapples have gotten super cheap. Many places still import pineapples from the tropics, but that’s not as expensive as it used to be, and competition with locally-grown greenhouse pineapples helped keep the price low. By 1897, a proposed U.S. tariff on pineapples provoked strong opposition—it had been set too high by people who didn’t understand how narrow the margins were. One critic, apparently ignorant of the history, warned that if the bill passed, “pineapples would become a luxury that only the wealthy can afford, whereby now they are in the reach of everyone.” (This is also a danger with the tariffs of 2025 because most U.S. pineapples are imported from Costa Rica.)
So long as you’re not crossing a picket line, as could have been the case during the Pineapple Strikes of 1947-51.
Are you in a non-tropical climate that is getting noticeably more tropical?
Debatable. Starting in the eighties, the world began to wake up to the phenomenon known as the Greenhouse Effect, where increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been turning the whole planet into a pineapple pit. It became possible to feel ethically responsible for your personal carbon footprint.
As it happens, the first solid data about carbon emissions came from a research station at Mauna Loa, a volcano in Hawai’i that also provides pineapples. People farm the slopes of volcanoes, despite the obvious downside, because volcanic ash gradually turns into unusually fertile soil. One 1990 book noted the analogy:
But from the point of view of mortal scientists, and the man and woman on the street, standing somewhere on the rising side of the Hubbert blip, everything to do with the greenhouse effect has seemed to be happening in extreme slow-motion. That may be the ultimate reason that it has taken us all so long to begin to worry about it. Even those who believed it was happening thought it was happening slowly. People lived in its shadow as comfortably as they live in the city of Hilo, under the volcano Mauna Loa.
The role of personal lifestyle changes in combating the Greenhouse Effect is what’s debatable, and I won’t try to resolve said debate here. Impactful Ninja rates the overall ethics and sustainability of pineapples as “fairly low.” Their carbon footprint comes from the packaging and shipping of pineapples, and the deforestation needed for a large plantation. If you go to the small family farm on Mauna Loa, you’re probably okay, if we ignore the carbon footprint of getting there.
Recently, volcanic rock has become key to a possible new strategy for carbon capture. In a process known as “enhanced rock weathering,” ground-up volcanic rock is mixed into farmland soil. Volcanic rock is already unusually porous, and by increasing its surface area, the rate at which it absorbs atmospheric carbon increases. This trick also accelerates the process where volcanoes increase the fertility of soil—left to nature, it can take centuries. And this way, you don’t have to be right next to the damn thing.
Enough inventions like that, and the ethics of pineapples could shift yet again.
Postscript
I sometimes sin and fact-check minor elements of an article only after I post it. When I compared the problem of equity in education to the problem of equity in pineapples, the only sources I checked before publishing were Wikipedia and my own memory. Afterwards, I wanted to make sure the core claim was true and learn more about the details. Hence the research that led to this bit of whimsy.
I find imported pineapple prices interesting because they fell, gradually, from “literally only kings and queens can eat one” to “cheap and nutritious fruit choice.” That means that on the way, pineapples passed through every possible cultural status.
In 1689, John Locke used them to argue for his “blank slate” model of the human mind—nobody can imagine the taste of pineapple without having eaten any.
In 1807, Aaron Burr boasted that he was treated so well in prison, he was even able to eat expensive fruit: “oranges, lemons, pineapples, raspberries, apricots…”
In 1823, a book about London and Paris said that wealthy-but-careless Londoners and tourists could “not unfrequently” end up in debtor’s prison for life after buying pineapple ice and out-of-season fruit at a shop on Pall Mall.
In 1866, a novel titled “The True History of a Little Ragamuffin” has the little ragamuffin steal a pineapple, whereupon the narrator, the ragamuffin all grown up, has to stop and explain to the reader that when he was a boy pineapples were much more expensive.
As a result, the pineapple motif in architecture meant different things at different times. Today, walking through London, you can see pineapple cupolas on St. Paul’s Cathedral, symbolizing power and prestige. You’ll pass by pineapple finials on the entrances to buildings, symbolizing generous hospitality. And then you can buy a real one at a fruit stall for the price of two postage stamps.
Abundance, like its costs, has often been hard to spot in the moment. In his diary for July, 1668, Samuel Pepys wrote that it was so “wonderful hot” that, for the first time he could remember, he only needed two blankets at night. He also wrote that he, a very rich man, was “troubled” by the cost of four engravings he’d commissioned of the king’s four dockyards. But Pepys isn’t around anymore to remember the “Little Ice Age” or boggle at how pictures of public spaces can be created for free.
All of which is to say—I currently consider it unethical for me to eat meat, but that could change. I recommend
’s for the details on why meat could, someday, be as unproblematic as a pre-Columbian pineapple.In nominal terms, their price has been pretty flat, so if you judge solely by the price of pineapples in London, there’s been no inflation between 1783 and the present day.
Now all I want is a pineapple.