OH WOW THESE ARE WONDERFUL THANK YOU FOR TAGGING ME!
Everyone in the notes going “oh no this is so cursed! What tree grows fruit out of the trunk?” Y’all ain’t gonna like how Cacao (the fruit chocolate is derived from) grows:
Today I got curious about nutmeg and wound up learning something I never would have expected: it looks Incredibly Cursed™️ when raw!
The outside fruit is normal enough, but the nutmeg seed itself is encased in this strange scarlet webbing, called the aril, and looks exactly like the demon-infected heart of a video game monster. That haunted webbing is the source of mace, an apparently common spice that I have literally never heard of but which is the source of the classic doughnut flavor, among other things. (It’s not related to the self-defense aerosol.)
I think most people know you can also get balls high off freshly-ground nutmeg and possibly die after the absolute worst trip imaginable, potentially lasting several days.
So, that’s fun! Doughnuts are flavored with Deeply Cursed Monster Hearts and I find this utterly delightful.
ALARMING! I love it!
When I took a trip to Dominica, a cab driver once spontaneously pulled over to the side of the road, hopped out of the car, ran off into the bushes, and returned carrying a handful of fruit.
“I bet you don’t know what this is!” he said excitedly as he split one open.
He was right, I definitely did not.
(He also did this with several other fruits and vegetables–apparently one of his major sources of amusement was how few foods Americans can actually recognize in their natural state.)
Why do you get high off freshly ground nutmeg but not like, the stuff you buy in stores?
I think you can get high off old, pre-ground nutmeg, but the active chemical myristicin might be more potent in freshly-ground nutmeg and require you to eat less of it. It’s an insoluable dry powder, so eating large amounts of nutmeg is difficult to begin with.
That said, it’s apparently the Worst High Imaginable with a long, uncomfortable hangover.
Everybody and their cousin has experienced the argument “is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable” at some point in their lives. It’s a fun bit of trivia, and let’s know-it-all’s speak condescendingly, or at least they did like 10 years ago. “Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”. Whatever.
Which brings up the point, that botany and culinary sciences are very different. Botany is the study of plants, culinary is cooking and how things taste. Botany is science, and it has rules (kind of), where cuisine is full of guidelines that are completely cultural.
Tomatoes are a fruit. A fruit is how many plants have babies, and are made in the ovary of a flower. I have a diagram.
Armed with this knowledge we can know that tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, peas and peppers are all fruit.
“Now”, I ask you, “what are lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and kale”?
“Vegetables”, you say, assuredly.
“Yes, but, what are they?”
“…vegetables”, you say, slower, and louder this time, not quite sure what I’m wanting from you.
No. They are leaves.
What are carrots, beets and radishes? Roots. What about celery and rhubarb? Stems. Potatoes? Tubers (food storage for the plant, and where new plant babies will grow from). Garlic and onions? Bulbs (also food storage). Mushrooms? They’re not even a plant, they’re a fungus, in the kingdom of fungi, which is somewhere between the plant and animal kingdoms.
“Vegetables” is just a word for plants that we eat, that doesn’t have enough sugar to be a fruit, and not enough flavour to be a herb or spice.
Botanically speaking, there is no such thing as a vegetable. They’re just different parts of a plant that happen to be edible.
There are other plants, normally considered weeds, that can be “eaten like a vegetable”. Dandelion, stinging nettle, dock, purslane, can all be cooked and eaten, making them vegetables, at least to the people to treat them as such. It’s all very cultural, and biased, and based on nothing but what people think it is. Therefore, they are not a real thing, it’s just a concept.
