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Symbols have always been used to signal one's status. Status symbols come in all shapes and sizes. Some rate diamonds or diamond tiaras as status symbols. Others desire the luxury cars, multiple homes, art objects, family signet rings, heirloom watches, or other multiple material objects.

But what about food? Did you ever consider food as a status symbol? Here comes that sweet deal from across the seas. The country's must-have accessory came to grace the tables of the very richest aristocrats' social gatherings. The status symbol of the 1700s was a sweet tropical fruit – enter the pineapple. Europeans hadn’t seen a pineapple before the 16th century. Soon, the aristocrats carried around a pineapple.

Yes, carried those sweet, tart tropical around and not eating them. The fruits were considered too expensive to just eat it. With a cost of thousands of pounds the fruit was a luxury available only to royalty and aristocrats.

It was also associated with royalty because of the top. Often called the King Pine or Queen Pine because of the top. The pineapple's "exotic appearance" gave it a mythical quality, which was "enhanced by its golden crown, viewed as the symbolic manifestation of the divine right of king".

Pineapples became such powerful status symbols, they sprouted a new trade. You heard of renting a power tool, but how about pineapple rental centers? The fruit appeared as rental centerpieces on lavish tables, not to be eaten but admired. Up-and-comers could rent a pineapple to show off at a swanky party or carry around a stroll. When others saw the fancy fruit, its status would rub off on the bearer of the pineapple.

Pineapple crime waves appeared. One man stole seven pineapples in 1807. This earned him a seven-year sentence in Australia. Nervous aristocrats hired security guards to keep an eye on their plants. The pineapple fad even affected interior design. Wedgwood porcelain pineapple teapots filled the shops. Paintings, bookends and cravings became the fad.

By the 1770s, "a pineapple of the finest flavour" became a phrase used for anything that was the best of the best. It's played upon in Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, when Mrs. Malaprop confuses the word with "pinnacle" and exclaims: "He is the very pineapple of politeness!”

“Charles' son and successor Charles II was so taken with pineapples that he commissioned a portrait of himself being presented with one - it was purported to be the very first to be grown in England, at Dorney Court in Berkshire, but it's now thought to have been imported as a juvenile and merely ripened on home soil.”

In a television adaptation of Jane Austen's unfinished Regency novel Sanditon, Lady Denham's grand luncheon has a pineapple in pride of place - although it is cut to reveal the inside is full of maggots, demonstrating the vast wealth of the character but also the transitory nature of the status symbol.

Eventually the craze ended when faster shipping meant cheaper prices for all tropical fruits. Once it became more affordable and the middle class could afford a pineapple; aristocrats shunned them and they no longer were a status symbol. And it wasn't just the middle classes who could afford a pineapple, but - horror of horrors - the working classes could too.

And you can thank the Dutch to change that highly cultivated carrot to orange. Yes! At one time, before the 17th century all carrots were purple.

More than 3,000 years ago carrots were used as ancient medicinal treatments in Asia. At that time they were wild crops that were typically purple or yellow. They were first cultivated as a crop around 900 BC in Afghanistan.

Around 1300, carrots reached Europe, but by the 1600s Dutch farmers selectively grew the rare mutation of orange carrots, not the purple ones. It isn’t known for sure why they preferred orange. It is theorized it was because they were honoring the House of Orange that ruled the independent Dutch Republic after they fought off Spanish rule. Others suggest that purple might have fallen out of favor because they tend to leach a dark pigment onto whatever they’re cooked with.

When the Pilgrim left Holland for the New World, they carried the orange carrot seeds and therefore spread orange carrots across North America. Food affecting history.