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Fitting food into categories is a crafty business . Tomatoesandavocadosgrow like fruit but discernment like vegetables . A watermelonis really a berry , and so is an mad apple . And if that were n’t severe enough to swallow , it turn out that most of the " balmy " we have sex to munch on are n’t really kooky at all .
Almonds , pistachios , peanuts , cashewsand even pecans — they ’re all just masquerading as nuts . How did we get it so amiss ? The trouble is that purchaser and phytologist cerebrate about nuts very differently .
A bowl of nuts.
Consumers consider what ’s on the food market shelf . If a woody shell - encased solid food is small , pear-shaped - ish , natural , ironical and crunchy , we are likely to call it a nut . But a botanist considers the whole plant life . A genuine botanical nut is a dry fruit with a single seminal fluid encased in a unvoiced , nonsplitting ovary bulwark , Judy Jernstedt , a plant scientist at the University of California , Davis , told Live Science . The voiceless outer eggshell of a true nut does n’t spread on its own — think walnut , chestnuts , hazelnut and acorns .
Related : Why are bananas berries , but strawberries are n’t ?
Virtually all other " wacky , " however , do n’t make the cut . Peanuts , for example , usually have two seeds and easily break loose , Jernstedt said . Because they grow in a pod , they ’re technically alegume , a family of plants that produce their fruit ( often beans ) in a fuel pod , and have more in plebeian with snow pea plant than actual nuts .
A bowl of nuts.
Almonds , cashew nut and pecan tree , on the other hand , are actually seeds inside a stone fruit , or a gemstone fruit . or else of the hard KO’d plate of a true junky , a drupe has a fleshy outer bed surrounding a pit that check the ejaculate , just as a cherry or a peach does . Almond seeds grow within a green , overweight yield , and cashews emerge from green , reddened and yellow cashew apple . For many stone fruit , we eat the blue fruit and discard the pit , but for nut - corresponding drupes , we do the opposite word : withdraw the outer layer , also call in the chaff , and deplete the seeded player inside the pit .
— What ’s the divergence between a yield and a veggie ?
— Does washing fruits and vegetables make them good ?
Two almonds with open husks in an almond tree.
— Is it safe to cut off the stamp and eat the remainder ?
Brazil nuts are not legume or drupes . The roughly 1.5 - inch ( 3.8 centimeters ) snacks are disqualify from being rightful fruitcake , because 10 to 25 of them grow inside a undivided fuel pod , harmonise to theNew York Botanical Garden . The orotund , wood - like pod — which weighs 4 to 6 lb . ( 1.8 to 2.7 kg ) — falls to the ground at adulthood , and rodents unremarkably gnaw at through its tough outside and aid in spreading the " semen . "
If we were to make grocery store shop shelves more botanically exact , there would be augury for " almond seeds , " " Brazil seed " and " peanut leguminous plant " placed nigher to peas than nut , Jernstedt said . But changing the names now would be tough for both consumers and botanists , she say . Most consumer are pretty set on their culinary idea of a egg , and some of the technical language for botanists goes back to classical scientists , like Aristotle . " I think we are stuck with it , " Jernstedt said .
in the beginning bring out on Live Science .
