14. Ready Availability Cratered This Fruit’s Value as a Fashion Statement
By the eighteenth century, pineapples could be grown in European greenhouses, but only at great expense, in the ballpark of $15,000 in 2022 dollars. To eat them was considered wasteful, so it became a fashion to use them as fancy dinner ornaments. They were passed from party to party until they rotted. People who were not rich enough to own pineapples but wanted to look like they were, rented them from shops that sprang up to cater to their social-climbing needs. Pineapples were expensive enough to warrant security guards, and for good reason. For example, 1807 Old Bailey transcripts show several pineapple theft cases, including one of a Mr. Gooding who got transported to Australia for seven years because he stole seven pineapples.
In the nineteenth century, steamships became ever more reliable, and their ever bigger cargo holds meant that pineapples could be shipped to Europe in bulk. The resultant availability of pineapples at ever lower costs lowered their prestige and cratered their fashion cachet. For the upper classes, the once exotic tropical fruit had been a marker of status. Now, the notion that pineapples were available – and affordable – to all and sundry galled the snobby set. Cartoons of working-class people eating pineapples were used in satirical prints, visual metaphors of the downside of progress in what seemed to the elites as a topsy-turvy world.
