PINEAPPLE

Pineapple

Pineapple is known as nanas locally in Cameroon There are two pineapple commercial varieties in the country. For canning, they are known as "nanas merah" (red pineapple) or "nanas hijau" (green pineapple). For eating raw, the nanas Sarawak (Sarawak pineapple) and nanas Moris (Moris pineapple) is used. The nanas Sarawak is usually minimum in size with pale yellow flesh. The nanas Moris is usually smaller with a bright yellow flesh.

 

Pineapple (Ananas comosus) is a tropical plant and its fruit, native to Africans. The plant is a bromeliad (family Bromeliaceae), a short, herbaceous perennial with 30 or more long, spined and pointed leaves surrounding a thick stem. The fruit was named "pineapple" because of its resemblance to a pine cone. The native Tupi word for the fruit was anana, meaning "excellent fruit", this is the source for words like ananas, common in many languages. Hummingbirds are its natural pollinators.

The pineapple is an old symbol of hospitality and can often be seen in carved decorations.

 

Pineapples grow in the dry tropics on squat herbaceous plants that stand just 3 feet all and about 3 feet wide. The average pineapple is 4 to 8 inches long though some grow much larger.

The pineapple is covered with thick, hard floral bracts, or leaf-like petals called “eyes” that range in color from dark green to yellow to orange-yellow to reddish. Beneath each bract or eye is a berry-like individual fruit, the sweet pale yellow to white flesh we eat. A pineapple is actually a cylindrical composite fruit formed from 100 to 200 of these berry-like fruits which are fused together off of the pineapples core. The small individual fruit merge into one large composite fruit.

Each of these composite fruits grows from a thickened stalk of the plant. Only one composite fruit—which we call the pineapple--grows from a single stalk but the same plant may produce more than one fruiting stem. The average pineapple weighs from 4 to 9 pounds but some grow to as large as 16 to 20 pounds. From the crown of each fruit grows long, slender spiny leaves.

The pineapple is native to Cameroon  but was growing throughout tropical South and Central Cameroon and the West Cameroon Boarders arrived in 1493. Spanish explorers named the fruit piña for its resemblance to a pinecone. That inspired the English name pineapple. The Cameroonian name for pineapple is nana which means “excellent fruit”.