Food Journal Week 10

Similar to bananas and plantains, my abuela uses pineapples very traditionally. But there is a difference between the “white” manifestations of the fruit that I see in the U.S. and what she considers white, “traditional”, or conservative. Often in my U.S. home, we eat the fruit plain, but it is also used in up side down pineapple coffee cakes or on kabobs with meats and vegetables. Here, I’ve only encountered in solid form sliced, accompanied by other fruits, at breakfast. Notably, it is never served until it’s totally ripe. About four times now, I’ve had pineapple juice with dinner, as I’m always served a refresco. It was made from a product similar to Kool-Aid, a kind of powder mix that’s blended with sugar and water, I think. Not that I am very disappointed by how artificial that is, but I was surprised the first time I saw my abuela making it in a tropical country! Not wanting to make her think I am questioning her cooking, I didn’t ask how long she’s been making fruit drinks that way. That little unexpected difference says much about how small, originally Stateside practices have slowly made their way into some households of this country. I’m most interested still by the almost puritan attitude my abuela has about the fruits. It reminds me of how many people in the States view steak!

I wasn’t able to expand my observations of pineapple’s roles in foods here because my Belgian housemate left this morning for Nicaragua along with his camera (how unfortunate!) From prior blogs, bananas in particular, I did notice jams, juices, and canned pineapple with “lite” sugary syrup. The main difference is that there are many more brands in the U.S. all competing with more or less the same product. Costa Rica’s two most important fruits are always resting atop our fruit/vegetable stand in the kitchen. The second photo was taken at a pineapple plantation near Limon that I asked Cyril, my ex-Belgian housemate with a camera, if I could use. He said it looked rough for the guys there.

Apart from the climate, I don’t think Costa Rica has become a pineapple giant without good reason. I think that Costa Rica could be called the Switzerland of Central America for its political stability. The relatively positive conditions seem to be very attractive for foreign investors, and the Costa Rican government has historically been prone to buy into deals with companies when they have the chance. After CAFTA was passed some six or seven years ago, barriers to U.S. investment were basically eliminated. In the CAFTA countries (Costa Rica included!), U.S. companies are treated as if they were local. This has likely been very significant for the increase in pineapple exportation, along with some minor declining in banana trade. In 2009, Costa Rica was near to being the leading exporter of pineapple, coming in third place behind Thailand and the Philippines. The fruit increased in production by about 300% from the year 2000 to that time. Concurrently, exportation rates have continued to rise with production, so much so that a lot of pineapple is now imported to Costa Rican supermarket shelves from other exporting countries in the Pacific. It is funny to think that a transnational corporation could sell pineapple that it grows from an investment on Costa Rican soil to people in the U.S. and sell pineapple that it grows in another country to consumers in Costa Rica.

My abuela was curiously uninformed about the status of the pineapple, but she and my abuelo were quick to point out a few dangers they had heard about the fruit. They said that the government shouldn’t let companies destroy land in their country just for a fruit. For them, it symbolizes an intrusion into the food context of mainly coffee and somewhat bananas that they’ve developed over many, many years. Although they made no objections to bananas in this regard, they seemed rather adamant about their concerns. This is because of the social and racial connections they talked about with bananas. It’s as if bananas are grown and sent off from another country or world. But pineapple, that’s very different because they must not see black workers when they imagine it. The kind of racism that they express is very mild, surely. It is almost unconscious in the way they talk about it, as if that’s just the way it has to be. How this affects their view of the two fruits is incredible to me, and I think that I would find very different perspectives from middle-aged or younger Costa Ricans who may have less embedded prejudice and who might know more about the economic importance of the pineapple today. The fruit is like the next savior of the export sector of the economy, giving Costa Rica an opportunity especially after the fallout of Hawaiian production. While I don’t think that many Costa Ricans yet have a clear idea about what the pineapple means and symbolizes for their culture, I do think that the fruit historically represents the transnational movement of cultures and power around the globe. From our readings, the “Pineapple Diaspora” section mostly, the spread of the pineapple in connection with the spread of commerce-led colonialism is clear.