The Foochows and Pineapples

There are many types of pineapples 菠蘿 or Wong Lai

grown in Sarawak.

At the moment the best and most well known one is the Bario pineapple which is very sweet and they have a very small head with a narrow neck. They tend to be longish in shape and can turn very yellow when over ripe. The species can be grown elsewhere in Sarawak but unfortunately the fruits won't be as sweet.

Others are the Paun or pound pineapple from Sarikei, the small Sarikei type, the Nenas Sawit or oil palm pineapple (which never turns yellow).

Like most people, Foochows love to eat pineapples, either as a fruit or as part of a dish like sweet and sour fish, sweet and sour pork. Only very recently some have learned to cook pig stomach with pineapples.

A popular way to eat pineapple is to mix slices of them in a nice fruit rojak.

Pineapples which are sweet like the Bario pineapples are often used to make jam and salad. Today, many restaurants offer pineapple juice as part of their F and B menu.

Pineapple juice can be used to make pineapple wine.



In the olden days pineapples were grown in many parts of the Rajang Valley but most of the foochow farmers only grew pineapples for home consumption. My father grew a lot of pineapples along the edges of our Sibu home garden to delineate our land from our neigbhours'. He felt that the sharp thorns on the leaves were good deterrents. Those were the days when we did not have to build high concrete walls to protect our home from thieves. A bamboo hedge or a line of pineapple suckers would do just as well.

The Foochows in the past also believed that eating too much pineapple can cause miscarriage. Indeed many Foochow women then did attempt to cause miscarriages by eating a lot of pineapples. There was one case, which might have been just a coincidence, that a woman even lost her life by eating a lot of pineapples when she found out that she was pregnant.

The Foochows thus say that pineapples are 'sharp' as they can cause stomach ailments and miscarriages.

However there were reports actually that some Foochows in the past did die from eating pineapples at the wrong time of the day. A man was very thirsty and hungry so he ate some pineapples at mid day, after which he died. There was a scientific report that if a person ate more than 3 or 4 pineapples at any one time, he could die.