Myth #12: “From the era of the ancient Greeks to early America, the pineapple has long been a symbol of hospitality.”

Westover Plantation, James River, with "pineapple" finial

The myth of the pineapple as a symbol of hospitality is a powerful one.  You hear it in most historic houses, usually in a dining room or bedroom when the tour guide points to a pineapple table centerpiece or a pineappply-carved bedpost and explains that the pineapple was served to guests as an expression of hospitality because it was so rare.  Rare it was indeed, and relatively expensive, coming all the way from the West Indian tropics to American ports—the pineapple would have been a treat on any early American table.  But there is not a shred of evidence that anyone at the time thought of the fruit as a symbol of hospitality. That idea came much later, in fact, not until the early twentieth century. So how did this widely believed myth get started?

Early Spanish and Portuguese explorers were the first Europeans to discover the pineapple, called na-na, by the natives. The Portuguese ananaz and the Spanish ananas no doubt derive from this native word, but the English called the new fruit a “pine-apple,” a word heretofore interchangeable with “pine-cone,” because it so resembled the pinecones they already knew.  The pinecone had strong and ancient ties to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine—Bacchus to the Romans—who carried a thyrsus, a staff entwined with grape vines and topped by a pinecone.  (That association related to the use of pine resin in the making of wine, Bacchus’s favorite beverage.)

Ever since classical times, the pinecone has symbolized fertility and regeneration and it has been used over the centuries as a decorative motif.  It is really the pinecone that the colonists were using in their decorative arts (carving on bedposts or using as finials on gateposts, for instance), evoking the classical symbolism that they, educated in the classics, understood very well.  (It’s a bit of a stretch to think our colonial forebears were carving pineapples on their bedposts as welcome-to-my-bed hospitality symbols.) Yes, they did also use pineapple imagery sometimes–I’m thinking of the ceramic pineapple dishes at Colonial Williamsburg’s museums, for example. But it symbolized the exotic fruit, not hospitality.

Amateur historian Melvin Fulks, who has spent decades gathering information about the origins of pineapple/pinecone symbolism, says that the earliest incidence of the “pineapple as hospitality” story he has been able to find comes from a 1935 book about Hawaii.

The pineapple myth simply refuses to die an honorable death.