28. The Ridiculous Fad of Renting Pineapples
By the eighteenth century, pineapples could be grown in European greenhouses- but only at great expense, in the ballpark of $15,000. Eating them was considered wasteful, so they were used as fancy dinner ornaments, and passed from party to party until they rotted. In one of the more ridiculous developments, people who weren’t 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 for stealing seven pineapples.
In the nineteenth century, the increasing reliability and growing carrying capacity of steamships enabled the importation of pineapples in bulk. The resultant availability of pineapples at ever lower costs lowered their prestige. That did not sit well with the upper classes, for whom the tropical fruit had once been a marker of status. Indeed, the notion that pineapples were available – and affordable – to all and sundry was galling to 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.