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3:24

This is the memory palace. I'm Nick

3:26

to Mau.

3:29

I'm gonna ask you to do something difficult. Right

3:33

now, wherever you are, whatever you're

3:35

doing while you listen to this, taste

3:38

a pineapple. Try

3:40

to remember what it's like.

3:42

Try to conjure that flavor and

3:44

chase that particular sweet

3:47

and bright.

3:48

pineapple. It's kind of amazing.

3:51

Even if it's not your thing, if it is too

3:53

sweet or acidic, if the texture

3:55

is weird, you're kind of stringy, you're

3:57

stuck in your teeth. the flavor,

3:59

the immediacy, the punch is

4:02

extraordinary. At

4:03

least it would be if there weren't extraordinary flavors

4:06

all around us. in all of the world's cuisines

4:08

developed over generations, improved over

4:10

time, honed and perfected, or

4:12

enabled by technological innovations. Stows

4:15

that maintain correct temperatures, refrigeration,

4:18

mixers, blenders, soupy bags,

4:20

test kitchens, and laboratories. food

4:23

technologists in sterile rooms and industrial

4:25

parks of the New Jersey turnpike innovating

4:27

and iterating. explorers

4:29

in the chemistry of delight. all

4:33

rendering the pineapple, that

4:35

spectacular punch of flavor, pretty

4:37

mundane. Your

4:38

average gas station is line with racks

4:40

and racks of snacks and treats and drinks

4:42

and bars and cup holder size breakfast

4:44

for people on the go that serve up enough

4:47

concentrated deliciousness that it could have had a

4:49

British boy between the wars betraying his siblings

4:51

to the white witch of Nardia. The

4:53

humble Cheeto, toxically

4:55

orange, not in all cheese like, can

4:58

change your day with a single crunch. In

5:01

the midst of all this flavor, It's

5:03

hard to remember just how amazing a pineapple

5:05

could be. But

5:08

King Ferdinand of Spain didn't forget.

5:11

And here I will ask you to do something else

5:13

that might be hard. And try

5:15

to imagine that you are the king of Spain.

5:17

It is fourteen ninety six and

5:19

Christopher Columbus, that guy

5:22

has just come back from his second journey to the Caribbean.

5:25

You have paid for these trips. You

5:28

had expected him to find a faster trade route

5:30

to the east. You waited four months

5:32

and months. Then low, familiar

5:35

sales appear on the horizon. You

5:37

are hoping for a huge haul of treasures from

5:39

China and Japan and India, and he

5:41

has instead come back with some birds.

5:44

And plants see things are from Asia, but of course

5:46

aren't. And a tiny bit of gold.

5:49

And let's not forget eight enslaved people

5:51

which I will add were originally joined by fourteen

5:54

others, but those people died in

5:56

the voyage. And when he

5:58

arrives, Columbus is essentially

5:59

spinning. and saying, look,

6:02

I know you were expecting silk and saffron

6:04

and gems and whatever wonders you've been dreaming

6:06

about while I was gone.

6:08

think there might yet be riches in this new

6:10

place. There's gotta be more gold.

6:13

And more people we could enslave to dig

6:15

the gold and plant these plants. And aren't

6:17

these birds pretty? And the pitch is

6:19

enough to get the king to pony up for a second voyage.

6:22

This one for keeps, a full

6:24

scaled up colonial mission. seventeen

6:26

ships, a thousand men, to go

6:28

get that gold and start laying the groundwork

6:31

for Spanish conquest in the west. that

6:33

they thought was the east, but you get it. More

6:36

months ago by. And the king,

6:38

I mean, you remember you are the king in

6:40

this exercise. Wait and wait. And

6:42

well, Columbus is out being a

6:44

monster. And

6:46

mean, this is not a story about Columbus,

6:48

so we're gonna move along here, but really

6:50

he does terrible things both to

6:52

individual humans, and ultimately

6:54

humanity, but he comes back.

6:57

and again, with a terribly disappointing haul

6:59

from Spain's perspective. You were

7:01

promised gold, there was no gold.

7:03

You were promised quick riches, and those

7:05

riches if they are going to come at all, will

7:07

not come quickly. But

7:10

there are parents and parents are always

7:12

fun. there is tobacco,

7:14

which seemed like a good idea at the time. And

7:17

there was a pineapples packed

7:21

into crates for the voyage, but that

7:23

voyage was long and they were all a pulpy,

7:25

sticky mess upon arrival,

7:27

except for one.

7:30

And

7:30

when one thing arrives in the kingdom, the

7:33

king gets that one thing. You

7:36

get the pineapple and you have never

7:38

tasted anything like it. And

7:40

you're the king. You have tasted all the finest

7:43

Madera and fish and finest

7:45

roasted chestnuts and all the land, but All

7:47

that stuff wasn't all that fun then.

7:49

Spices and sugars and

7:52

fruits flasher than a pair were barely

7:54

heard of. This pineapple. was

7:56

quite possibly, quite literally,

7:58

pound for pound, bite for bite, the

8:00

tastiest thing that had ever been on European

8:03

soil.

8:06

The king raved about it, pronounced

8:08

it better than any other fruit by leaps and bounds,

8:12

and no one else got to even try it. And

8:15

Columbus wasn't even set to return to the pineapple

8:17

having corners of the world for another two years.

8:20

So the pineapple for the king

8:23

sailed off into those mysterious re of

8:25

memory. This incredible thing

8:27

he had experienced once. But

8:30

for everyone else, for the court, for

8:33

the court adjacent noblemen and noblewomen, for

8:35

landowners and clergy, and anyone who had

8:37

heard about the pineapple. about this

8:40

extraordinary fruit from these newly discovered

8:42

lands. Lands filled with wonders and

8:44

dangers and the unknown. What

8:46

a thing to some learned that there was this whole world out

8:48

there beyond the horizon for everyone else.

8:51

The pineapple became tied to that.

8:54

to that feeling and living in

8:56

the rush of

8:58

the magic of that moment of endless

9:00

possibility. And

9:02

what's more? This fruit wasn't

9:05

conjecture. This

9:06

wasn't mythical creature or

9:08

some city goal that might be out there somewhere

9:10

if we'd but dare to seek it. It

9:12

was a real thing that had been

9:14

eaten by the king. It

9:17

wasn't conjecture. It

9:19

was commodity. And

9:21

for the next four centuries in Europe, the

9:24

pineapple was the embodiment of elite

9:26

status, like

9:27

jewels or gold, an object of

9:29

desire, and it was an object that was

9:31

impossible to obtain without ships man

9:33

and money to command them and

9:35

guns to subdue the people who would stand in

9:38

the way of the literal fruits of your conquests.

9:40

It was depicted in paintings and patterns

9:43

and wallpaper and finials on

9:45

lintels on parapets. A

9:47

French writer before one had even been eaten

9:49

by French person declared

9:51

the king of fruits, as

9:54

Google translate tells me, the English

9:56

philosopher David Hume, and the opening

9:58

pages of his most enduring

9:59

work

10:01

makes the case for his groundbreaking empirical

10:03

approach to understanding nature of being.

10:06

But

10:06

pointing out that no matter how much we read about the

10:08

pineapple, we can never understand the

10:10

pineapple without tasting it ourselves,

10:12

which no one could do for the longest time. The

10:15

king of England had plenty of ships

10:17

and men and money and guns. did not

10:19

get to eat one himself until we

10:21

think sixteen sixty,

10:23

a full century and a half after Ferdinand

10:25

Spain had. And so rare and royal

10:27

a thing was this fruit. That in sixteen

10:29

sixty eight, the ambassador France came to

10:31

see him for a set of contentious meetings,

10:34

Charles the second of England had a pineapple,

10:36

fresh in from Barbados, placed

10:38

in the center of the table as the embodiment of

10:41

British colonial might. Like,

10:43

don't mess with us France. We've got

10:45

super tasty fruit. In King

10:47

Charles' use of the pineapple as a tool

10:49

for the projection soft, juicy power

10:51

didn't end there. He commissioned

10:53

a monumental painting in which he is depicted

10:56

standing wrigley before a kneeling man.

10:58

the royal gardener

10:59

who is proudly presenting the king with pineapple

11:02

grown in the royal gardens. And

11:03

this was alive. There was no way

11:05

at that time to grow tropical fruit in and

11:07

fog. But people believed

11:09

it and

11:10

assumed that not only was Britain a rising

11:12

military power and colonial empire,

11:15

It was also making unprecedented leaps

11:17

in agriculture. And

11:18

this kicked off an era of international competition,

11:20

a kind of cold war waged with warm weather

11:23

of fruit. The Dutch royal family

11:25

led the way, built the first modern greenhouse,

11:27

and then the British king's gardeners were planning them

11:29

for real, and then the French installed

11:31

a heated indoor pineapple grow operation

11:34

in Versailles. Before long, every

11:36

rich guy just had to have a greenhouse of his own.

11:39

But even as over the course of many decades,

11:41

people got pretty good at growing pineapples in the

11:43

British Isles and on the continent. The

11:45

proposition was extraordinarily expensive. the

11:47

rooms in which they grew had to be kept warm year

11:49

round. For the three or four years that it takes

11:52

a pineapple plant to bear single fruit.

11:54

In heating requires coal and

11:56

people to shovel it, And the pressure

11:58

on the wealthy to keep up with the

11:59

Joneses or the Habsburgs was so intense

12:02

that people began renting out pilos.

12:05

Other businesses popped up to sell the tops

12:07

of old pineapples, the spiky part.

12:09

So if you had people coming over and you were going

12:11

to give them a tour of the gardens, you

12:13

could stick those tops in the ground so they would

12:15

poke out and people would think you could afford

12:18

to grow real pineapples. And how

12:20

much did that cost? It is estimated

12:22

that by the time a pineapple got to the table

12:24

of some fancy pants monkey

12:26

mark. That fancy pants monkey

12:28

mark It spent the equivalent

12:31

of nearly nine thousand dollars

12:33

to get it there, nine grand

12:36

per pineapple. And

12:37

at what cost?

12:39

Well, it

12:42

would be disingenuous to lay all

12:44

of the ills of European colonialists of

12:47

the estimated fifty to a hundred million

12:49

people who lost their lives as consequence of

12:51

the guns and ships and the diseases

12:54

they carried. displacement and

12:56

exploitation

12:57

at the feet of the humble pineapple. But

13:00

no single fruit had

13:01

as large an impact on human history.

13:04

as that one king for a mandate unless

13:08

you believe the story about that one that Adamate.

13:11

The fever for pineapples. Not

13:14

just the flavor, but for the

13:16

idea of the pineapple, what it represented

13:19

wealth and the wealth that can be extracted from

13:21

far off lands. Change the world.

13:24

Change the economics and the ecology

13:26

of lands all over the globe. wherever

13:29

the colonial powers could plant Caribbean pineapples,

13:32

they planted them. In India,

13:34

the Philippines, and

13:35

change how people lived, how they got to live,

13:37

The

13:38

Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown in nineteen

13:40

ninety three and annexed by the United

13:42

States government five years later because

13:45

its ruler It's Queen. Didn't

13:47

want the islands run by pineapple parents.

13:50

She wanted to diversify her country's agriculture

13:52

as means to ensuring its independence.

13:56

While the dull pineapple company wanted to clear

13:58

cut whole islands and plant

13:59

pineapple fields, and

14:02

that's what they did. Because four hundred

14:04

years earlier, a king thought a fruit was

14:06

yummy. But

14:08

a pineapple this morning when I swung by the grocery

14:11

store because ran out of trash bags.

14:15

The pineapple is delicious, probably

14:17

much more so than confer nets. as

14:20

they have been bred over these centuries to be juicier

14:22

and more flavorful. I've

14:25

been tinkered with my generations of agronomists

14:27

and food scientists of increasing

14:29

capability and technological sophistication,

14:32

and planted in fields and sun soaked places,

14:35

darkened by the shadows cast by countless

14:37

ships and guns in men.

14:41

cost me four bucks.

15:19

This

15:20

episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced

15:22

by me, Nate Demayo. The show

15:24

gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

15:26

It did a proud member of radiotopia,

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a network of independent listener supported

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profit public media company. If

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go to radiotopia dot f m. And

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while you are there, I

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implore you to check out a show called articles

15:46

of interest. This is

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a podcast about clothes, about their

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people, honestly, every truffleman.

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She's a new series of episodes out right now

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sure you will too.

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Go listen and subscribe to articles

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Talk to you again.

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radio to me. From

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