Have you ever sat around a dinner table debating the appropriateness of putting tomato into a fruit salad? You might be surprised to learn how many fruits do not adhere to our traditional concepts of what a fruit is, including walnuts (Metaflora answer #474). This is because biologists classify plants into categories according to their basic structure, whereas society tends to divide edible plants up by context and culinary function. Biologists are not concerned with which part of a plant is edible when they are categorizing them, and botanical categories are not very relevant to our day to day discourse, leading to a dissonance in the taxonomies we use. For instance, chili is a berry, as are avocados, bananas, and melons. And raspberries are not berries - they are a cluster of small stone fruits!

Walnuts are stone fruits just as much as peaches are. They are the oldest tree fruit known to man, as there is archeological evidence that we began eating them 45000 years ago. The kernel of a walnut is energy-rich because it is the food source for a growing walnut tree. That’s why it’s so packed with nutrients, and contains 65% fat by weight.

Here are some other surprising categorizations: coconuts, almonds, peppercorns and mangos all belong to the same category, stone fruit. However, we eat different parts of each: the seed of the almond, the fruit wall of the mango, the entire peppercorn, and the nutritient part of a coconut (which serves the seed as it grows).

“Vegetable” isn’t actually a category of the plant kingdom - we use the word to refer to any edible part of a plant, such as roots, leaves, and stems. Think of all the things we refer to as vegetables: broccoli is a flower, lettuce is a leaf, potatoes are underground stems (tubers).

Learn more: Science Norway, Jerry James Stone

Monday, January 13 to Sunday, January 19.

The following are the shortest paths from last week:

Play Forgeous for Jan 20