In the 1700s, People Rented Pineapples for Parties: 12 Foods Whose Price Flipped

In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, sport fishermen on the Atlantic coast caught giant bluefin tuna for fun. The fish were weighed and photographed, then thrown away or sold to makers of cat and dog food, Smithsonian reports. In 1800s Tokyo, tuna even had a nickname: “fish that even a cat would disdain.”

The turn came in the early 1970s, when tastes in Japan shifted toward rich, dark fish, and cargo planes began flying New England tuna to Tokyo. In January 2013 a single 488-pound bluefin sold at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market for $1.76 million.

In the late 1800s the Delaware River was full of sturgeon, and in the 1860s a boomtown called Caviar grew up on its New Jersey shore. Today it is Bayside. By 1895, 22 caviar and sturgeon wholesalers worked there, and 15 train cars of roe left for New York every day, National Geographic reports.

Caviar was so plentiful that in the 1880s some New York bars piled it onto free sandwiches for their customers. In 1885 German dealers paid $9 for a 135-pound keg. Fifteen years later, the same keg was worth $100.

In 1651, Plymouth governor William Bradford looked back on the colony’s hardest early years and wrote that “the best dish they could present their friends with was a lobster,” with nothing to go with it but a cup of spring water. Lobster was everywhere, and nobody bragged about serving it.

You may have heard that servants’ contracts limited lobster to a few meals a week. That is a myth: an MIT Sea Grant study found no law, bill or petition behind it, and food historian Kathleen Curtin put it plainly: “It never happened.” Today a lobster roll is a summer splurge.

In 17th-century England pineapples were “rare and highly valued exotic items,” says the Royal Collection, which owns this painting of King Charles II being handed one. In Georgian Britain, historian Francesca Beauman told CNN, a single fruit could cost up to £80, which she puts at almost $15,000 in today’s money. Some people rented one for a few hours, just to carry it around at a party.

Then imports took off: by 1850, 200,000 pineapples a year were unloaded at London’s docks, and canning later made them ordinary.

On May 15, 1915, California farmers met at a new hotel in Los Angeles to fix a marketing problem. The fruit they grew went by ahuacate, which was hard to say, or alligator pear, which didn’t sound like food. They chose a new name, avocado, and told the dictionary publishers.

Back then the fruit was a luxury: by 1914, hotels in Los Angeles and San Francisco were paying as much as $12 a dozen. Today California grows nearly 90% of the avocados in the United States.

New York was once an oyster town. Author Mark Kurlansky told NPR that oysters were sold at stands on every street corner.

From the American Revolution until the last city oyster beds closed in 1927, the price barely moved. One deal, the Canal Street Plan, was all you could eat for six cents, at a time when a fancy restaurant charged 50 cents for one out-of-season strawberry. Today a dozen oysters on ice is a treat.

Nigiri, the hand-pressed kind of sushi, is credited to Hanaya Yohei, a chef in Edo, today’s Tokyo, about 200 years ago. He sold it from a street stall before opening a shop in 1824. Customers ate standing at stalls called yatai, and one piece cost about 8 mon, under ¥100 in today’s money, by Nippon.com’s count.

Tuna, that “fish even a cat would disdain,” ended up on top: when cheap tuna flooded Tokyo in the 1830s, at least one street chef began slicing it raw and serving it as nigiri, Smithsonian reports.

For centuries chicken came from small farm flocks, so it was a dish reserved, because of its cost, for special occasions like Sunday dinner, American Heritage notes. Then, in 1923, Mrs. Wilmer Steele on the Delmarva Peninsula ordered 500 chicks to raise for meat and sold them at 62 cents a pound.

In 1925 Delaware produced 50,000 chickens for market, and the next year it topped a million. By 2004, the USDA counted 59.2 pounds of chicken per American a year, more than double the 1970 figure.

Buffalo’s favorite story says wings were invented one night in 1964, when a local bar cooked up a batch that had arrived instead of the backs and necks used for sauce. It is a legend with a twist: in 2025 a Buffalo News food critic found five ads from fall 1963 already offering “fried chicken wings,” so the dish is at least a year older than its story.

The part nobody wanted became a national habit. The National Chicken Council projected that Americans would eat 1.48 billion wings during the February 2026 Super Bowl.

Many early Europeans were wary of the tomato, and early American colonists grew it out of curiosity, not to eat it, National Geographic writes. By the 1830s, tomato recipes and cookbooks were being published across America.

You may also have heard that in 1820 a colonel ate a whole basket of tomatoes on the courthouse steps in Salem, New Jersey, to prove they were safe. That is a legend: no record of it has ever been found, and the story first appeared in a local history book in 1937.

Tea arrived in London by ship in the mid-1600s, and even after prices began to fall in the early 1700s, it stayed expensive. The Museum of the Home in London says a pound of tea cost the equivalent of a servant’s yearly wage.

So families kept their tea in a caddy, often with a lock and key. Today a box of tea bags is one of the cheapest things in a British kitchen.

In 18th- and 19th-century Naples, pizza was what the city’s working poor could afford. In the late 1800s, writer Matilde Serao described it as extremely cheap food that “turns yellow in the sun, eaten by the flies.”

The famous story says a Naples pizza maker created the Margherita for Queen Margherita in 1889. National Geographic lays out why it may be made up: a pizza with basil, mozzarella and tomato was described in 1853, and no newspaper of the time reported the royal visit. In 2017, UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan pizza maker to its heritage list.