10 Interesting Facts About The Pineapple You Probably Didn’t Know

However we know and are sharing that information, along with other facts associated with the fruit, in this article.

Pineapples are great fruits and there are many reasons to love them. Here are a few more:

1.  A pineapple is not the combination of a pine or an apple, neither is it any of the two. It is a fruit consisting of many berries that have grown and fused together.
2. Pineapples are not a single fruit, but essentially a group of berries. The technical term for this is a “multiple fruit” or a “collective fruit”.
3. Scientists call the pineapple Ananas comosus, a word that comes from the Tupi words “nanas” aka pine and “comosus” aka tufted. Tupi is the language spoken by the Tupi, an indigenous people of Brazil.
4. Hawaiian call the pineapple “hala kahiki” because they thought the pineapple looked a lot like the “Hala” fruit. “Kahiki” is a word that means foreign.
5. Pineapples are filled with nutrients that prevent scurvy so they were historically known to be useful on long boat trips. Juice from it can also be mixed with sand to clean the boats.
6. Pineapples eat you too. It sounds like a scene from a horror movie but its true.   Pineapples contain an enzyme called “bromelain” which breaks down proteins in your mouth. Hence, when you eat a pineapple, it is eating you back. Thankfully the stomach can break down the enzyme so there's no need to worry about being eaten from the inside-out.
   

   

7. The presence of seeds has a negative effect on the quality of a pineapple fruit even though they are necessary for pollination.
8. Sometimes it takes more than two years for a pineapple plant to produce one pineapple fruit.
9. Pineapple plants have the ability to grow from seeds through vegetative reproduction (cloning). The cloning can be done using  four different parts of the plant including the crowns, slips, suckers, and shoots.
   

   

10. You can trick pineapples into flowering using smoke. It was first discovered on the Azores Islands. What causes this is a component in smoke known as ethylene.