The Golden Pineapple
The holy grail of the pineapple growers and how it destroyed Maui
A modern-day tale of the Garden of Eden
Man’s expulsion is followed by wildfires
There are many American dreams, of which the Golden Pineapple is one. As its name suggests, the Golden Pineapple — known upon its market debut as the Del Monte Gold — was distinguished by its Technicolor golden hue, as well as by its sweetness, the product of an ideal brix-to-acid ratio, and an unusually long shelf life that allowed it to be sold as fresh fruit even in the continental United States, where a pineapple, especially one grown in Maui, might take two or more weeks to reach a supermarket shelf. The Golden Pineapple was created by a methodical, decades-long breeding program sponsored by Hawaii’s three leading pineapple growers to create the perfect fruit. In the records of the Pineapple Research Institute (PRI), the Golden Pineapple was known as “the 73-114” — the identifying number which represented the year and the number of the pot in which it was grown. This end-product of over two million genetic crosses accomplished over forty years with the goal of creating the …
