Blood Pineapples

Follow the pineapples. Hardly a scene straight out of All the President’s Men, where Washington Post reporters Woodward & Bernstein were exhorted to “follow the money” while they investigated the Watergate scandal, but still telling. Challenged to chase our quarry from the plantation all the way to the Whole Foods Market in Portland to understand its carbon footprint, we’ve tracked the incredible journey of a single Del Monte pineapple to the checkstand here as follows:

First, the precious fruit travels 60 miles by truck from a plantation in the Atlantic lowlands of Costa Rica to Puerto Limon, where it’s loaded onto a freighter. Next, it travels 2,335 miles by sea to the Del Monte distribution facility at Eddystone, Pennsylvania. It then travels 214 miles by truck to the Whole Foods distribution center in Cheshire, Connecticut. Finally, it travels 226 miles by truck to Whole Foods off Marginal Way in Portland.

This results in a figure of .2544 cups of fuel for every pineapple sent from Costa Rica to Portland, Maine, and .36 pounds of carbon dioxide released per pineapple. At least at first glance. But some of the inadequacies of this calculation jump out at you. First, these ships are refrigerated, which means that they burn additional fuel in that endeavor. Distribution facilities are also refrigerated, have lights, etc. That is mitigated by the distribution facility in Cheshire, Connecticut, having a photovoltaic roof, but it doesn’t remove the cost completely. Then you can look at packaging, estimated life of shipping vehicles and transport ships–it goes on and on. This is essentially why “10 people” at Dole, a competitor, are reportedly trying to arrive at calculations for their pineapples but have a planned completion date for the study of “three years,” which means essentially ‘never’ in the information age. Bad news may ride a fast horse, but nobody ever hears it if the horse never gets out of the barn.

Blood pineapples aren’t like blood diamonds, where human death tolls figure horribly into the bargain. In New England iconography, the pineapple is the very emblem of hospitality–so often you see them carved onto the tips of bedposts or on hotel stationery. One of the most affecting scenes in Cabaret is when the elderly couple in wintry pre-war Berlin sings a sweet duet in celebration of the rare pineapple they get to share. It’s just that maybe we shouldn’t eat pineapples unthinkingly, or even negligently, here in Maine. Beautiful things are all the more rare and dear when we understand the cost.



Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher

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