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In 2019, you could have used $22,000 of your savings to buy a car or pay (in-state) college tuition and room and board for your child, or you could have… bought a melon.
That year, a pair of Yubari King melons sold at auction for $45,000, making them the most expensive fruit ever sold. The Yubari King is a hybrid cantaloupe (one of its cultivars is the “Burpee’s Spicy Cantaloupe,” which doesn’t sound like the thing you’d take out a loan to buy) grown in Japan. Yubari Kings are usually expensive, but not that expensive — you can find low-grade versions for $20-30, and very sweet ones for a few hundred bucks. But, occasionally, a melon is so perfect that it inspires bidders into a wasteful frenzy (there have been other really expensive Yubari Kings: in 2022, two sold for $23,550, and in 2023, two fetched $25,000).
What’s so great about the Yubari King? Like, how can you justify paying 5,000 or 10,000 times what I would pay at the local supermarket for a cantaloupe? Well, the Yubari Kings get a lot of TLC — only one is grown per vine, and farmers clean them every day, topping them with paper shields to protect them from the sun. After being picked, they’re carefully graded and then displayed in wooden boxes. The really good ones have brochures that accompany them, helping the cantaloupe connoisseur understand what they’re getting.
These cantaloupes are part of Japan’s culture of expensive, luxury fruit: the $7 handful of grapes, the $10 strawberry, the $70 square watermelon. They’re often given as gifts (considered thoughtful because they won’t sit in someone’s house unused like all of the candles you’ve gotten over the years) or enjoyed as a special treat.
As strange as the case of the Yubari King might seem, it’s not the first fruit to attract such intense and expensive attention. The pineapple I bought at the grocery store for $1.99 last week was once seen as the height of exotic luxury, inspiring spending that rivaled that at the Sapporo City melon auction.
Pineapples are native to South America. They used to be unpleasant little fruits, full of seeds and hard to eat. But native Brazilians, through trial and error, managed to create seedless varieties that wouldn’t crack your teeth and cultivate them all over the region. Knowledge of pineapple cultivation spread to the Caribbean and Mexico; the Carib people called it nanas, “excellent fruit.”
When Europeans came in contact with the pineapple (so named because it looked like a pinecone: Columbus called it piña de Indes, "pine of the Indians"), they agreed that it was an excellent fruit. Columbus brought some back for King Ferdinand; they all rotted except for one, but it was a good one. A Spanish chronicler wrote that
The most invincible King Ferdinand relates that he has eaten another fruit brought from those countries. It is like a pine-nut in form and colour, covered with scales, and firmer than a melon. Its flavour excels all other fruits. This fruit, which the King prefers to all others, does not grow upon a tree but upon a plant, similar to an artichoke or an acanthus.
This was only the beginning of Europeans’ love affair with the pineapple. Claudia Geib collects some of the most over-the-top reactions to its yellow flesh:
They encountered the fruit for the first time in the Caribbean and then in South America, and their letters and diary entries describing the fruit channel the hyperbole of a lovesick teenager. Take, for example, a description penned by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in 1535. He wrote that the pineapple was unprecedented in “beauty of appearance, delicate fragrance, excellent flavor,” and that, “of the five corporeal senses, the three which can be applied to fruits and even the fourth, that of touch, it [is] excelling above all fruits.” “There is no nobler fruit in the universe,” French explorer Jean de Léry wrote of the pineapple. Dutch economist Pieter de la Court declared: “One can never be tire’d with looking on it.” Later, English writer Charles Lamb embraced it with sadomasochistic relish: “Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lovers’ kisses she biteth.”
I guess they liked pineapples! Can you tell that these people lived in a world without sweetness in every food?
A fruit this exciting got attention from artists, as well. This Spanish depiction is the first known picture of a pineapple:
The plant was eye-catching, for sure, with a showy fruit growing atop a relatively squat base:
Europeans soon began to grow pineapples in their tropical colonies. By 1600, the Dutch were growing them in Java (they’re the little plants labeled “annanas:”
Or marked “F” on this drawing:
By the early 1600s, people were even including pineapples in Garden of Eden scenes:
Pineapples soon became a symbol of the Asian tropics, in addition to the Americas. They feature prominently in this mid-17th-century Dutch painting of an “East Indian Market:”
And appear here in this French depiction of the Chinese court, produced around the turn of the 18th century:
Like many of our most ridiculous obsessions, pineapples attracted so much attention because they were so hard to get. Unlike some other fruits, they don’t ripen after you pick them, so people had to harvest them at the peak of ripeness and race the forces of decay to get them to Europe. Wealthy and powerful Europeans began to covet pineapples not because they were tasty but because they were exclusive. To have a pineapple on your table meant you had access to rare, refined things and that you had money to waste on extravagances like tropical fruit.
Thus began “pineapple mania,” a period in the 1700s when wealthy Europeans spent their disposable income not on feeding the poor or sponsoring artists but on obtaining the sexiest pineapple. Rich people would display them on the dinner table for guests to admire. Some would reuse the same pineapple over and over again without eating it, preferring to risk letting the fruit rot uneaten to impress their friends and rivals. You might be able to rent a pineapple if you were short on cash.
European gardeners began to try to grow pineapples in colder climates. This was difficult because pineapple plants require constant warmth and take a couple of years to bear fruit. Growing your own pineapple was incredibly costly — Etienne Fortier Dubois estimates that growing a cold-climate pineapple cost £80, which translates to something like £12,000 in today’s currency.
Growing a pineapple was a feat worthy of commemoration, and artists memorialized gardeners’ efforts (and the largesse of those who funded the gardens). Agneta Block, the first Dutch person to grow one, got a coin:
While we see the King of England’s royal gardener, John Rose, handing his first pineapple to Charles II:
This image is inscribed, "To the perpetual memory of Matthew Decker, Baronet, and Theodore Netscher, Gentleman. This pineapple, deemed worthy of the royal table, grew at Richmond at the cost of the former, and still seems to grow by the art of the latter. H[enry] Watkins set up this inscription, A.D. 1720:"
Soon, pineapples became a symbol of wealth. In this cartoon, the Prince of Wales parties with a pineapple prominently displayed on his table:
And here we see Napoleon threatening to invade the King of England’s pineapple:
If you couldn’t get a real pineapple, you might invest in a ceramic one. There were pineapple teapots:
And cups:
And pitchers:
But the most famous homage to the pineapple was the so-called “Dunmore Pineapple,” which tops the walls around the Earl of Dunmore’s garden, built in the 1760s in Scotland:
Artists also included pineapples in plenty of still-lives, often emphasizing the decadence of the fruit:
But by the time this last painting was produced, in the 1830s, pineapple mania was coming to an end. Noblemen no longer had to build expensive, impractical gardens to get their hands on pineapples, because steamships could now get the fruits across the ocean before they rotted. By the end of the 1800s, refrigeration and canning made pineapples a cheap and convenient treat.
You could now buy pineapple cider, which apparently had amazing healing qualities:
And “delightful” pineapple juice:
Facilities like this cannery in Australia made it possible to put pineapples on the shelf of every grocery store in the world, in any season:
All of these innovations meant that pineapples were for everyone. Prices collapsed, and the aristocracy, having lost interest in fruit, turned its eye to other rare items that they could collect and display for status.
Now, I can often get a pineapple for a cheaper price per pound than apples, even though I live much closer to apple-growing regions than I do to the tropics. I don’t display them on my table for guests to admire; I just scarf them down for an afternoon snack. In our world of abundance, it’s hard to imagine desiring a fruit so much that I’d be willing to pay through the nose for one. Then again, I’ve never had a Yubari King cantaloupe.
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