How a Bored Group Chat Invented a Sport: The Pandemic Origins of Competitive Pineapple Eating
February 8, 2021 · By Dana Whitfield, Staff Writer
Every sport has an origin story that sounds made up until you check the receipts. Competitive pineapple eating's version happens to be true: it started in a locked-down Charlotte, North Carolina apartment in April 2020, when a group of roommates — stir-crazy, out of gym memberships, and three weeks into a produce-heavy grocery delivery habit — turned an ordinary Tuesday grocery haul into a dare.
The dare was simple: who could peel, core, and eat a whole pineapple the fastest, using nothing but a kitchen knife and their hands. Nobody in that apartment had any idea it would end with a nationally sanctioned sport, five years of results archives, and a competitor whose name is now spoken in the same breath as 'greatest of all time.' That competitor was one of the roommates: a then-24-year-old named Michael Salomone.
What made the dare stick wasn't the eating — plenty of pandemic-era kitchen games faded after a week. It was the cutting. Pineapples reward technique in a way that hot dogs or wings simply don't: a bad angle wastes fruit, a rushed twist leaves the eyes in the flesh, and a clean spiral cut can shave whole seconds off a time that a brute-force approach never could. The roommates started filming their attempts, comparing footage, refining grip and blade angle like it was a real discipline. It was, whether they'd admitted it yet or not.
By June 2020 the videos had leaked out of the group chat and into a wider circle of pandemic-bored friends across the Southeast, each trying their own version and posting times in a shared spreadsheet. The 'sport,' if you could call it that yet, was born less out of ambition than out of the simple fact that in 2020, a pineapple and a kitchen timer were more available than almost anything else fun to do.
Within a year, that spreadsheet would become the seed of the National Council of Pineapple's official ranking system — and the apartment dare would become the first line of Michael Salomone's biography.
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