Pineapple

Some pineapples don't rot and make good homes...

Today I drank pineapple juice; it wasn’t anything special, nor did it taste particularly authentic. That’s always the case these days when I have some juice: it’s either a watery brew or some sort of chemical syrup, but rarely the juice of real fruit.

The average pineapple is also far from tasty. That’s hardly surprising, of course, as it’s not a fruit that grows here. I’ve tried propagating pineapples by simply cutting off the crown and sticking it in the soil. That should produce another pineapple, but as is usually the case, it doesn’t grow. I don’t know if it’s just the climate (short summer), or the soil too; for some reason, everything here dies probably because of the rubbish the previous owner buried in the ground for years.

Tinned pineapple has lost its flavour too. The pieces are often incredibly hard, poorly processed, and either in syrup or water. There’s a clear difference when it comes to this fruit, and the good stuff is certainly not exported, or it gets ruined during tinning.
Speaking of unripe fruit, because that’s definitely what these hard chunks of pineapple are, the sort that almost break your teeth and have no juiciness to them: all the other fruit has lost its flavour as well, and I’ve lost most of my appetite for eating fruit. I can’t actually remember the last time I ate a lot of fruit; there is a bowl of kiwis, but they’ve been there for two weeks and they’re still rock-hard and incredibly sour; the skin is also very hard.

A few months ago, my daughter told me she’d seen on the internet how a small child ate the skin of a kiwi and that the father then went to find out whether this skin is actually edible. This is, of course, because the child had eaten it, but it turns out that, as with most fruit, the skin or the layer just beneath it contains the most vitamins. Now, the kiwis I have are certainly not edible, let alone the skin, which is particularly thick; even if you eat them with skin l, this skin is unpleasant to chew or swallow, so you just have to spit it out.

As far as fruit is concerned, I stopped counting on getting any vitamins from it a long time ago. Most fruit doesn’t contain by far the vitamins they are know for anymore, simply because of the way it’s dna is manipulated, it's grown, distributed, picked, transported and stored, and as for the juice: even if this were 100% pineapple juice, the vitamins would have long since disappeared. Fruit juice only contains vitamins the moment you’ve just squeezed it; after that, the content drops rapidly, whatever little is left in it at all.

_{Prompt: see title
5-4-2026}