Everything you thought you knew about eating pineapples is a lie

Viral food hack shows we've been eating pineapple the wrong way this entire time

There are some things in life that we all just have to accept. British weather is unpredictable (and will probably get even more unpredictable with climate change). Game of Thrones is coming to an end very soon. And cutting up and chomping down on some sweet, sweet pineapple is a painful, awkward ordeal.

Trying to eat a pineapple can sometimes be a strangely traumatic experience: you're never quite sure where to start slicing, or how to hold it to avoid the prickly bits, and all too often the juicy fruity goodness ends up wasted due to your less-than-stellar chopping skills.

But wait! Be prepared for perhaps the greatest food hack the internet has ever produced. 

A Twitter user has shared a way to pull apart the fruit, leaving you with perfectly-formed, bite-sized chunks. 

The viral video, posted by Swedish Twitter user Dennis Naghizadeh (who took it, external from short-form video app TikTok), shows someone grabbing a segment of pineapple and pulling it from the spine of the fruit with ease.

The 13-second video has now been viewed more than 17 million times (at least two million of those views are us because we simply cannot wrap our heads around this incredible hack). It also has had over 160k retweets and almost 400k likes.

Of course, people instantly wanted to try the fruit-eating technique for themselves.

"So the pineapple thing works!" one satisfied customer wrote. 

And she wasn't the only person to be impressed by the hack. 

Game of Thrones superstar Lena Headey even shared the clip on Insta with the apt caption: "#gamechanger". We agree Cersei... we agree. 

Some people were a little disturbed by the unsettling sound, external of this strange new fruit hack. 

But not everyone was totally convinced. 

One Twitter user, with a less-than-ripe-looking pineapple, really struggled to make it work

And US TV host Kari Byron said: "Tried this today and it didn’t come apart like this!"

One potential explanation for why pineapples can sometimes be pulled apart so easily is that they are, in fact, something we call 'multiple fruits', external.

A multiple fruit, such as a pineapple or a fig, is the result of a fusion of individual 'fruitlets' on a single stalk meaning they can then be separated when ripened.

"Multiple flowers each produce a fleshy fruitlet that becomes pressed against the fruitlets of adjacent flowers, forming what appears to be a single fleshy fruit," according to Science Direct, external.

How fascinating! 

Amazingly, this food hack trend has even inspired a whole new genre of pretty hilarious fake hack clips.

But this isn't the first food-based hack to wow the internet. 

Last year, we were all impressed with a video of a cheese grater being used in a totally new, more sensible way.

Grating cheese is something pretty much all of us do on the reg - whether it’s a hearty (and seemingly indestructible) Red Leicester, some classic mozzarella for your pizza, or a block of creamy cashew-based vegan cheese.

So people were disturbed when Bea Symons, a tattoo artist from Nottingham, posted this video of a cheese grater being used in an online recipe video - which has since been viewed 3 million times. 

Basically, if you’re like us, you’ve probably been holding the grater upright and slicing the cheese downwards (scraping your fingers in the process).

Like so:

But this is all wrong. Instead, according to Bea’s video, you put the grater on its side and move the cheese horizontally.

The cheese then collects very neatly in the main body of the grater - and anyone who’s grated cheese the traditional (and wrong) way knows that there’s usually a lot of cheesey mess involved.

Then, when you’re done grating, you can just drop all the cheese into a bowl.

Not gonna lie, this is even worse than that time we realised we’d all been wearing our bras wrong.

“I feel a fool,” Bea wrote - and others agreed.

But some people - like England cricketer Kate Cross - had their own suggestions.

We’re on board with that one.

Although not everyone was convinced...

And, naturally, there were puns flying around.

To be fair, once we get over the intense burning shock, we'll appreciate how life-changing all this information is. And there are other hacks out there that can help you live life a little better too.

So don't mind us, we're just off to the supermarket to clean out their pineapple stocks because that's all we're going to be eating for the foreseeable future. 

This article was originally published on 17 October 2018.

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