I never have anything to write about, so I blab.
There’s a good reason why people prefer buying pineapples canned instead of whole and fresh. It’s the same reason why stores prefer to sell more canned than fresh.
The reason is very simple: most of the fruit isn’t even edible. By the time you’re finished slicing and dicing the massive fruit, barely anything’s left.
I’m not sure if the company’s are courteous to do this all of the time, but sometimes the tags are labeled with instructions on how to prepare a pineapple; it’s a kind of recipe.
First you have to cut off all of the leaves, a sort of top hat for the fruit. I guess they assume you’re going to use some type of machete, if not a saw, because it sounds just about impossible with your average run-off-the-mill kitchen knife unless you’re willing to risk finding a hand short of a finger or few.
Well after that part’s accomplished, half of the fruit’s volume has just been chopped off and what you have left is this kind of full, voluptuous pinecone with very shallow crevices.
You’re supposed to skin the thing, Grandma says next, ignoring the tag and throwing it into the trash. She can’t read English anyway so why should she care? She doesn’t even know it has directions on it. Out of nowhere her hand takes out this huge butcher knife she uses maybe twice or thrice a year for slabs of meat thicker than my neck, which could easily chop off one of my legs with less than two swings at it.
After the brown pieces start to chip off we’re left with this naked yellow thing that was much less than half the size of the pineapple we began with and it’s full of these tiny brown holes.
Pockmarks, I’d like to consider them. They’re in this diagonal pattern all along the yellow outside.
“Those,” Grandma points, “aren’t edible either,” she says in Cantonese. So she goes along the fruit cutting deep ridges to pick out 3 or 4 of the pockmarks at once in a few swift movements with the weapon. Afterwards, we’re left with less than a fourth of what we began with and I don’t know how else we could destroy the fruit.
“We’re not done yet,” she says as I’m about to leave. “There’s still the middle.” So she slices the baby thing into fourths and slices off the inside parts of each slice.
Knowing how much was left of the poor pineapple, after the 30 minute process, if we had chopped the 4 large slices into tinier pieces, one pineapple could have easily fit into a tiny can, at most 2. That huge pineapple that started as larger than my head how looked like it could fit in 2 M&M bags, one for my right and the other for my left palm.
It would have saved so much time and effort if we had bought it already in its condensed state. No wonder everyone else does.