Everything you've ever wanted to know about Processing Pineapples... But were too bored to ask

Hi everyone on Julie's Blog! I'm Julie's friend Dustin!
While she's away I get to take over and post some of MY stuff. I'm an engineer, so I thought I'd teach you something engineering... something neat... something that would totally bore the crap out of Julie's regular blog readers...

I got it: this is how you process pineapples!

Pineapples are native to South America, and were named that way by the European colonists who thought it looked like a pinecone. One pineapple plant, which kind of looks like an aloe plant, grows a flower in the middle. The stem of the flower eventually gets fat and spiney, and grows one pineapple once per year. The flower on top turns into leaves (sometimes left on in the supermarket), and the pineapple is ripe about 5 months after it blooms. Workers break it off of the plant at the bottom and bring it to the processing facility.

At the facility they're washed over and over again in chlorinated water to get rid of the bugs, dirt, poo, and frog eggs (frogs like to lay their eggs in pineapple leaves where they collect water). They're then classified on basically how pretty they are: the best are exported, the second best are sold near where they are grown, the third set gets turned into dried and canned pineapple, and the uglies are juiced.

Since the best looking ones are pretty much ready to sell, they're coated with a layer of wax, boxed up, and shipped. Some still have leaves, or crowns, and some do not, so they're sorted and shipped as such. Grade 2 pineapples are just shipped to market: no work to be done there.

The juicing is pretty simple, too: workers skin the pineapples with huge knives, and they're ground up and squished. If you've ever seen apple cider get made, just add the "pine-" and it's the same thing.

Third pineapples are skinned by hand by workers with big knives. The skin is so tough they have to be sharpened every half hour. The core is removed by a big piston, and the meat that's left is cut by a 12-blade reciprocating saw, which cuts doughnut shaped slices about an inch thick. From here they're either canned as is, cut into chunks and canned, or manually laid out on racks and baked at 150 degrees for 24 hours. The slices are packaged and shipped around the world, and can be eaten up to 18 months after they're made.

Yummy!

Still awake??