A while back, my hubby asked how pineapples grow.
My first guess was that they grew like coconuts or dates, high in a palm-like tree. I imagined a tall tree with lots of pineapples hanging off it. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I’m going to give a brief overview of pineapple growth (it’s crazy!). If you want to learn more, check out this website. If you want to see pictures of the process, Dole has an excellent line-up (see it here.)
The pineapple plant is short and stocky. They look a little like a yucca plant. A couple hundred flowers grow out of the top. For most fruit, this would mean a couple hundred fruits would emerge, but not the crazy pineapple. The hundred or so flowers create berries, and the berries join together and make one pineapple. That’s right. Each plant grows only one pineapple, which is made up of multiple fruits.
It can take up to thirteen months to grow a pineapple. And each tree grows only one pineapple at a time. There are approximately 300 billion pineapples grown in a year, so there are about 300 billion pineapple plants. That is amazing.
I hope you read more about this crazy fruit. It may be a tasty addition to hams and fruit cups, but like most mass-produced items, it has the good, the bad, and the ugly.