Have you ever tried
Growing pineapple?
The fruit of the pineapple plant.
G
rowing a pineapple in your house in Canada isn’t easy and takes a lot of time. If you just want a pineapple to eat, don’t bother. But if you like a challenge, let’s go. It’s a plant Pineapples don’t grow on trees. They grow one per plant, and the plant is big: between three and six feet wide. In addition to a tropical climate, you need a lot of land to grow pineapples. A plant looks like a bigger version of the top of a pineapple, and that’s what it is. Big, strappy leaves grow from a thick central stem. Eventually, that stem will grow a spikey inflorescence with about 200 blooms. As those blooms mature, they fuse together to form the fruit. Pups will grow from between the leaves, and these can be removed to make more pineapple plants. In fact, this is how most pineapples are grown. Pineapples are self-sterile and require a different pineapple variety to be pollinated. In nature, hummingbirds do the pollination. The flowers don’t require pollination to set fruit, though. Origin Pineapples are native to Paraguay and Brazil, and they have been cultivated in South and Central America for about 4000 years. Christopher Columbus found the fruit 18 • 2020
in the Caribbean on his second voyage and brought some specimens back home to take Europe by storm. So impressed were people with the fruit (and so unable to grow it for a couple of hundred years) that it became quite a status symbol. There are reports that you could rent a pineapple to show off to guests or to bring to a party with you in the 18th century. You wouldn’t eat a pineapple until you’d showed it off and it was starting to rot. Missing fingerprints? Pineapples contain bromelain, which is known to break down protein. That’s why pineapple juice will tenderize meat, but also why some pineapples make your mouth hurt: the enzyme is eating away at your flesh! There’s a rumour going around that pineapple juice will erase your fingerprints and that people working in pineapple canneries have lost their digital identifiers. It’s not true… well, not exactly. First, people who work with the raw pineapples wear gloves because the bromelain does damage the skin and it’s quite painful. Second, while bromelain can reduce fingerprints temporarily, they will regenerate. As for using pineapple to tenderize meat, go for it! But recognize that bromelain is so good at this job that the meat will turn to mush if you leave it for too long; an hour is the maximum. Issue 1
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