Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (review)

A typical list of the American food crops that have shaped the diets and economies of Africans and Eurasians would probably have maize and potatoes at the top, followed by cassava, beans, tomatoes, and tobacco. Most likely, pineapples would be missing. Native to South America, the pineapple spread first to the Caribbean basin, where Carib Indians introduced it to Columbus during his second voyage to the Americas, and then to Europe (despite many obstacles to its cultivation there), Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific. Whereas maize and potatoes took decades to be accepted into Old World diets, only to become primarily foods for the poor, the pineapple caused an immediate sensation for the wealthy. French and British nobles constructed absurdly expensive hot houses for the privilege of putting these treasured tropical fruits on their temperate climate tables.

Okihiro uses this unique quality of the pineapple—its status as an object of consumer desire—as a point of departure for this intriguing book. For Europeans, the pineapple was a symbolic representation of a verdant, fecund, and, above all, passive and feminine tropical zone, contrasted with their own vigorous, active, masculine temperate zone. Thus does it provide Okihiro with a trope through which to explore the historical relationship between the West and its colonies.

The book is stunningly erudite and easy to read; the author demonstrates an amazing range of knowledge. His evidence stretches from Greek geographers to Alexander von Humbolt’s journals to advertizing copy produced by the Dole Fruit Company to illustrations on cruiseship menus. In Hawaii, Okihiro’s case study, the chain of events that led to the discovery, depopulation, repopulation, and exploitation of the Americas is replayed 300 years later like a recurring nightmare with a slightly different cast of characters.

In other ways the book disappoints. It begins with an attack on “glib assumptions of solid space and inexorable time” and threatens to substitute “historical formations” for the linear progression of time (1). Mercifully, Okihiro does not really follow through on this aim; the book has a fairly conventional narrative flow—beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending with Dole Foods. But a more thorough discussion of what Okihiro means by “historical formations” and how he meant to use them would have been helpful.

Okihiro chooses unusual and potentially interesting units of analysis, but he never provides a satisfactory explanation for them. His world is divided between the tropical and the temperate zones, but his temperate zone is really just a reified version of the West. He does not clarify why his loose geographical distinction is any more informative than more traditional formulations like the North and South or West and East. Had he moved beyond the West in his examination of the temperate zone and considered, for example, Islamic ideas about the effect of climate on human societies, the book might have developed a fundamentally new line of thinking. As it is, his temperate West imagines, exploits, commodifies, and domesticates tropical Hawaii in a not unfamiliar narrative.