Nuts, Berries, or Drupes?

First off, I feel I owe all of you another apology. Maybe a double one. We are on vacation in warm, sunny Florida, and so are (aren’t?) missing out on all that delicious below zero temps you’ve been enjoying. So that’s one (that we’re warmer than you right now). The other is because of the timing of the holidays, I lost track of what day of the week it was or what the deadline should have been. So I didn’t get a column written last week. I’m crying crocodile tears over that lapse. (In other words, sorry, NOT sorry.)

We haven’t just been enjoying sunshine and warmth while here, we’ve also attended a three-day hockey tournament our grandsons were competing in. I wanted all of you to know we have seen ice. We had to wear long pants and don jackets a few times. (Side note: their 10U Peewee A team won first place.)

The hockey tourney was held in Fort Meyers, while our daughter and family live just south of Tampa. We stayed with her in-laws in their three bedroom condo and enjoyed watching our shared grandsons compete. In casual conversation with Elaine (she’s

grammie and I’m gramma, the men are Boompa and grampa), who loves snacking on nuts, I mentioned that cashews are not actually nuts. This led to a google search for what they are, which is a drupe.

The official definition of a drupe is: “in botany, a simple fleshy fruit that usually contains a single seed, such as the cherry, peach, or olive. As a simple fruit, a drupe is derived from a single ovary of an individual flower.”. Drupe is pronounced droop, but has nothing to do with sagging. Synonyms for drupe are pome, simple-fruit, berry, and stone-fruit.

Cashew trees are tropical evergreens. They can grow to 14 meters, but most cashew drupes (they form on cashew apples) are harvested from dwarf cultivars. I’d read the trees grow in Brazil. Cashews are protected by a toxic outer shell, but they’re roasted to neutralize the acid.

In searching out this info with Elaine, we discovered that most food items we identify as nuts aren’t really nuts at all. Most people know that peanuts are legumes, as are soybeans, lentils, and chickpeas. They may or may not grow underground, and come in self-opening pods. True nuts are hazelnuts, acorns, and chestnuts.

Other drupes are: almonds, which grow inside the peach-like fruits of an Asian tree; walnuts, which grow inside green fruits; pine nuts, which are meticulously harvested from pine cones (accounting for their high price); Brazil nuts, which come from 4-6 pound pods that may contain two dozen seeds; macadamia nuts, grown in Australia (I don’t know why I thought they came from Hawaii); pistachios, which have shells that ‘pop’ open when the seeds reach a certain size; pecans, which grow in Mexico and the US and so are North American; and coconuts.

I also found out that raspberries and blackberries are technically not true berries at all. They’re also drupes, in which many small drupes (drupelets!) are clumped together, but they grow from a single flower. But blueberries are berries - whew.

This whole discussion prompted my daughter to ask if an avocado is a fruit or a vegetable. That search brought us to this answer: it is a fruit, but in the berry family! It contains one large seed. You can use avocados as a fruit or a veggie, much like tomatoes. The layman’s term I found says fruits contain seeds on the inside while vegetables don’t. That brought strawberries into the mixed up discussion. Wikipedia tells me these are also not berries, from a botanical viewpoint. They’re an “aggregate accessory fruit”, which is a mouthful. What we see as seeds on strawberries are actually individual ovaries (!) of the flower. So the seeds are inside the ‘seeds’. (The red part is the center of the flower.) I’m going to try hard to forget that part about ovaries the next time I eat a strawberry.

It seems as though every answer I found brought up more questions. I’ve decided food classifications are weird. Science can complicate things, but it is necessary to classify exactly what we’re talking about. But it’s making my head hurt right now, so I’m going to end this with the reminder that fruits and drupes and nuts are all good to consume. Just do your consuming with moderation.

I may or may not pontificate on this next week. I still have questions. But I might find other Florida oddities (such as strangler figs I wrote about last year) to research instead. Only next week will reveal the answer.