A Very Short History of the Pineapple in America (Before It Became a Sport)

The pineapple's association with hospitality in American and European culture predates competitive eating by centuries. In colonial-era port cities, whole pineapples were so expensive and rare that some households reportedly rented them by the day purely for display at dinner parties, returning the uneaten fruit afterward to be resold.

That changed dramatically with the rise of Hawaiian pineapple agriculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which turned what had been a luxury import into a mass-market grocery staple. It's a detail modern competitors occasionally invoke with a laugh: the same fruit once too precious to actually eat is now being timed to the tenth of a second in a Council-sanctioned bracket.