Pineapple

Pineapple is not the product of a tree, nor is it a single fruit in the usual sense. It is a bromeliad that produces a multiple fruit: numerous flowers develop into fruitlets that fuse around a central stem. Its cultivated form, Ananas comosus, arose through Indigenous domestication in tropical South America, with likely ancestral connections to southwestern Amazonia and the Paraná–Paraguay region.

Because people moved and cultivated pineapple long before European arrival, its original wild range and exact place of domestication are difficult to separate. Indigenous communities selected plants for larger, sweeter, less-seedy fruit and propagated them vegetatively from shoots and crowns. They carried pineapple widely through lowland South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of Mexico.

Europeans encountered cultivated pineapple in the Caribbean at the end of the 15th century. Spanish and Portuguese voyages then helped move it across the Atlantic and into tropical parts of Africa and Asia. Its need for warmth made fresh pineapple rare and prestigious in cooler Europe, where wealthy growers later raised it in heated glasshouses.

Today, pineapple is grown throughout the humid tropics. Costa Rica is especially important to the international fresh-fruit trade, while the Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Mexico are also major producers. Hawaii played a famous role in the canned-pineapple industry, but that history should not be mistaken for the fruit’s origin: pineapple is fundamentally a South American domesticate.