Food and agriculture

The Fruit on the Gatepost

In eighteenth-century Britain, few possessions announced wealth quite as loudly as a pineapple. Fruit shipped from the Caribbean seldom survived the voyage in a fit state to eat, and growing it at home required heated glasshouses, a skilled gardener and two or three years of patient tending before a single plant bore fruit. Only the grandest estates could contemplate the expense. The pineapple thus came to be valued less as a food than as a display, so [1] so that a single fruit, it was said, might be carried from one dinner party to the next, admired on the table and returned to its owner uneaten until it began to rot. Nor was its image confined to the dining room. Carved pineapples appeared on gateposts and rooftops, and one Scottish earl had a garden building crowned with a colossal pineapple made of stone.