Food
A pineapple plant needs up to two years to produce a single fruit.
Each plant grows one pineapple at a time from the centre of a spiky rosette of leaves. The fruit is actually many small berries fused together around a central core.
Why is this true?
Pineapples are bromeliads, a family of slow-growing tropical plants. Growers can trigger flowering with the gas ethylene so that a whole field ripens at the same time.
More facts in this category
More about food
Food facts sit right where biology, chemistry and history overlap. A fruit that is technically a berry, a spice worth more per gram than silver, a sweetener that never spoils in a sealed jar — the reasons usually come down to sugar, acid, water and how long humans have been moving plants around the planet. Each entry explains the mechanism in plain language, and links to a source if you want the longer version.