psmv5: Pineapple

Down to the market yesterday - it being Thursday - to buy a pineapple. A bit green looking, but there were a lot of them about, so one supposes that a big load had turned up in one of the central markets. This one was £2.60 from Waitrose: two would have been better value, but I thought it best to try one first. Also, they are very sweet and one might not want two in fairly rapid succession.

Back via the Screwfix Passage and Blenheim Road, where I found that Ford is wearing the First Line Recovery trucks down, presumably by popping in one of their secondhand cars whenever a gap appears.

While this morning, First Line Recovery had gone altogether, the first time for what seems like months. How long will it last?

While across the road, the sandbags noticed at reference 1 outside what used to be the Tchibo warehouse had vanished, and a new tenant looked to be moving in, helped along by a van from Amazon. A new tenant called 'The Padel Hub' which I now know to be an indoor sports facility, an operation with four or five such facilities, set up in 2023 by Viktoriya Kozilar and Charles Elliot Winterton. A spot of Anglo-Saxon enterprise with just a whiff of Eastern Europe? The fastest growing indoor game in Western Europe?

With the snap above lifted from reference 2. Or if you are good for some pretty gruesome voice and music work, you can try reference 3. Perhaps not for us - although they might have a public bar which would be convenient.

Home to inspect the pineapple, which turned out to be from Costa Rica, so presumably air freighted across the pond in the hold of an otherwise half empty jumbo jet. Did some of them get to be stuffed with cocaine or fentanyl? Neither Bing nor Google admitted to any knowledge of '307ZAU pineapple'.

We decided that horizontal slices were the way forward. Not bad at all, if a little messy, with my getting syrup all over my hands. Very sweet indeed, with a curiously sour after taste which came on when you stopped. But rather good as an occasional treat.

We came across a few seeds during our excavations, perhaps a millimeter long, presumably falling out of the tough brown bits which one cuts out. One of them is visible below and to the left of the knife in the snap above.

I then wondered about whether it counted as junk food, in the sense of references 4 and 5. It turns out not: there is a massive prejudice in favour of fresh fruit expressed in the scoring laid out at reference 5, which means that 100g of fresh pineapple scores a massive minus five for that, scarcely touched by its two plus points for sugar. So gobble away, all is well!

While I am reminded by reference 6 of the importance of pineapples among the biologists who do Fibonacci numbers, for whom see reference 11.

PS 1: some interesting stuff is to be found at reference 7. For example: '... Approximately 70% of workers in the Costa Rican pineapple industry are Nicaraguan migrants. These migrant workers are the secret to Costa Rica’s pineapple success...'. So they don't just export migrants, they import them too. More of the same at reference 9.

PS 2: The Del Monte corporation are very big in the pineapple world. The CEO and biggest shareholder is one Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, who appears to have been born in Jerusalem and is resident in Jordan. Inter alia, he is into large yachts. A Palestinian who has clearly done well. See reference 10. Gemini's offering, to be checked tomorrow, is included above. According to him, it's all about Ruby Glow.