Pineapple is a tropical fruit native to South America. The pineapple has gone through a very illustrious career as it quickly spread to the Caribbean basin, to Europe, then to Africa, and to parts of Asia. Foods such as maize and potatoes were considered as primary foods for poor in the society while pineapple represented a fruit of the wealthy. Nobles from British and French dignitaries went ahead and built expensive hothouses to grow pineapple in their temperate climate tables (Burin, 2009) .
Georgia O’Keeffe was a famous flower painter. O’Keffee painted exotic blooms of plans such as ornamental banana and lotus. Before World War II the boundary between commercial advertising and artistic work was blurred. Though a firm boundary separated fine art and commercial art, known corporations such as Coca-Cola used artists to paint canvases relating to their product line for marketing purposes. Floral parts of plants inspired O’Keffe’s brush. Hawaiian Pineapple Company, Dole offered O'Keeffe an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii for her to paint pineapple for advertising campaigns. She ended up painting two images: Pineapple Bud and Heliconia- Crab Claw ( Saville, 2012) . Dole Company was impressed by her painting, and they used them in advertising in Vogue magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. A message in one of the painting layouts proclaimed that: “Hospitable Hawaii cannot send you its abundance of flowers or its sunshine. But it sends you something reminiscent of both – golden, fragrant Dole pineapple juice” ( Saville, 2012) .
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O'Keffe's pineapple painting featured a national advertising campaign for Dole Company. The advertisement was successful in marketing the pineapple not only in Hawaii but also in different regions of the world. Dole Company reaped a lot of profits, and its pineapples were able to infiltrate nearly all grocery stores and homes in America. On the onset of World War, Dole's pineapples conquered the global market, and it supplied more than eighty percent of the world's fresh and canned pineapples. Dole’s aggressive marketing of the Amazonian fruit by transporting consumers to its tropical paradise in Hawaii enabled the pineapple escape alienations of modernity (Saville, 2012) .
According to Okihiro (2009), the quality of the pineapple fruit became a status object of consumer desire. Okihiro's overview of pineapple culture is hardly that of a delightful fruit, but it is a juncture representation of imperial expansion, consumerism, and a transition to the modern advertising industry. For the Europeans, the pineapple fruit represented the green and feminine tropical zone in comparison to their masculine and active temperate zones. Europeans monarchs had a wild desire to own pleasure gardens which made them exert authority over resources of foreign lands (Okihiro, 2009).
The pineapple culture shifts from an idea of commodity-chain economics into a device of American Imperialism in Hawaii islands. Bearing the fact that the pineapple was a native fruit from American tropical regions, it gave the U.S an edge as an imperial power and a good representation of tropical splendor (Burin, 2009) . Dole's company breakthrough in making the fruit available as a conspicuous consumption affordable for the growing American middle-class, changed its viewing as a fruit of plunder and prize on empires.
The spread of the fruit in different regions of the world resulted in global competition for the production of the pineapple. Hawaiian pineapple production was outpaced by the output from countries such as Brazil and Thailand. The fruit evolved into a symbol of generosity and hospitality and ceased being American global imagery (Burin, 2009) . The Pineapple Culture gives an elaborate view of world economic history or American imperialism. The pineapple is a representation of the power of commodity-chain approach to world history.
References
Okihiro, Gary Y. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones . Vol. 10. Univ of California Press, 2009.
Saville, Jennifer. "Off in the Far Away: Georgia O'Keeffe's Letters Home from Hawai'i." (2012).
Burin, Nikki Berg. "Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 272 pp., $24.95, hardback, ISBN 978-0-520-25513-5. This is the second volume of a projected trilogy dealing with time, space, and apparently, Hawaii. The first, Island World, decentered Hawaii by showing."
