The world of fruit has been rocked after videos appeared on the Internet which suggested that people have been eating pineapple the wrong way for hundreds of years – and no we don’t mean by using it as a pizza topping although that too is, obviously, wrong.
Until very recently, the only acceptable way to eat the knobbly fruit has been to slice into it with a knife before chopping it into neat segments or chunks – but then along came #pineapplehack and everything changed.
A multitude of videos have appeared on social media in recent days suggesting that instead of cutting at a pineapple with a knife like a normal person, you can much more easily peel segments away from the core of the fruit.
Minds were blown as #pineapplehack trended world wide and people expressed shock and awe at the capacity of the Internet to uncover new truths which could make all our lives better.
Millions of people simply retweeted the videos without bothering to check if the new method was actually possible.
That would not, however, be The Irish Times way. Rather than just accepting the latest viral sensation as a fact, we went out and bought ourselves a pineapple to see if we could replicate the experience.
We chose carefully and made sure not to go for the cheapest fruit on the market as we were concerned that a lack of ripeness might sour our experiment.
We instead paid €2.50 for what looked like the ripest and juiciest pineapple in the most expensive fancy Dan food hall we could find – we’re looking at you Fallon & Byrne.
And then we carefully followed the instructions we had seen online. To. The. Letter.
We cut the head off the pineapple and gently prised a segment off. What was supposed to happen next was that all the subsequent segments would just pop right off. And then we too would have created a video that would quickly become a viral sensation.
But did that happen? No, no it did not.
We were gentle at first as we tried to separate segments from the core. They didn’t budge. So we applied more force and succeeded only in peeling tiny pieces of pineapple off. Juice sprayed everywhere. Pieces of pineapple scattered far and wide. But no matter how much force we applied to the pineapple or no matter how delicate we were, we were still unable to replicate the Twitter videos.
Effectively, all we could manage to do was to tear an innocent piece of fruit apart with our bare hands. It was messy. It was wasteful. And it was infuriating.
And the worst thing about it was that at the end of the experiment, we had only eaten about three mouthfuls of the juicy fruit.
The only conclusion we can draw, then – and it is a conclusion that has left us beyond disappointed – is that the Internet is not always the most reliable source of information and some of the life hacks its shares with us are – in fact – nothing more than examples of fake news.
