'Pineapple Culture': prickly fruit that wrought changes

"Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones"

by Gary Y. Okihiro

University of California Press, 255 pp., $24.95

It's hard to imagine that there is manifested in a fruit as commonplace as the pineapple such historical forces as imperialism, conquest, ethnic cleansing, industrialization, even the development of American consumerism.

But Gary Okihiro, who comes from three generations of Hawaiian pineapple workers and who is now a Columbia University professor of international affairs and public policy, makes a compelling case in this slim but significant study, second in his planned trilogy on the history of Hawaii.

That isn't to say the book's a page-turner. The first third makes the dry, overlong argument that the Western world, dating back to the ancient Greeks, felt itself culturally superior to Asia, particularly those inhabitants of more uniformly hot climes.

The book picks up speed, though, when Okihiro turns to the pineapple itself — its diaspora from the Andean foothills of South America to tropical colonies worldwide, its high status on the dining tables of nineteenth-century Europe and America, and the devastation of both Hawaiian culture and the island's diversity of flora that was accelerated by the cultivation of the monocultural, non-native pineapple (as well as by sugar cane).

The book richly details the rise of early twentieth-century pineapple planter James Dole, the almost unwitting beneficiary of three convergent trends: industrial cultivation and canning methods, a fragmented Hawaiian government that sold tracts of land there at a pittance, and an emerging American middle class with the buying power to render pineapples an everyday food item.

In the long, sad story of the industrialization of our food, this is a well-told chapter that is both unique and redundant.