Posted 12/17/2005 12:43:00 PM by Douglas

I'm going to have to give the next pineapple I see in the grocery store a little more respect.

In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, John Locke asserts the impossibility of knowing the taste of pineapple before you have actually tasted it. This is not just a throwaway remark; he returns to the point in several drafts and in several places. In 1671, Locke wrote that the man who has never had pineapple, that “delicate” fruit, “in his mouth” cannot have a true or “new” idea of it. He can only have an amalgam of “old” ideas based on the descriptions of travellers. Later, he wrote that “we see nobody gets the relish of a pineapple, till he goes to the Indies, where it is, and tastes it”. To think that you could relish a pineapple without really experiencing it was like imagining you could see colours in the dark.

. . .

Fran Beauman’s conclusion is that, while pineapples have lost their seventeenth-century exoticism and their eighteenth-century majesty, they actually taste better now than ever before. It is impossible to read this scintillating monograph without feeling what luck it is to be alive in a time when both the form and taste of pineapple are neither as inaccessible nor as unimaginable as they were for John Locke.

I don't think most people realize that the lives of the average American are substantially better than the crowned heads of Europe only 200 years ago.