Hidden Fruits

This one isn't about anything socio-political. Social, perhaps, but not political (or at least I don't mean for it to be). It's just about those sweet, natural delights we call fruit. It's just that I mean to spill the banks of what we mean by this term because our use of it tends to be anthropocentric and focused on largely practical culinary uses. There's nothing wrong with that. I just want to offer a broader definition of the term than seems to be in currency and some observations about it.

Nearly all of my adult life I've had some fascination with plants, and chose to keep at least a few around, if not many. I have for several years and continue to grow ginger and turmeric plants, all grown from roots purchased at markets, and frequently lemongrass, grown from stalks bought at Asian markets. My cat likes to nibble on the lemongrass. I grow other things, too, but these are the ones that I just like to keep growing, whether or not I can grow enough to use it (I often just gradually let it expand; I don't currently have the ability to give them a place to grow to really expand on their own).

It just never stops blowing my mind that I can take something I got at a grocery store and plant it at home, and end up with far more understanding of the where the foods I like to eat come from. I have also been known to brew (naturally alcoholic) ginger beer based on cultures captured from raw ginger root. And I've captured native sourdough cultures just with water and flour (and used them to bake some delicious breads). I don't do a lot of it currently, but I doubt I'll ever stop seeing it as practically a miracle, and a deceptively easy one for anyone to pull off.

But that's probably enough preamble about me and my relationship with our non-human, non-multicellular-animal cousins in this strange, engrossing physical journey on Earth. What I really wanted to talk about was things that are, at least by my view, fruits, but which people just rarely, if ever, think of as such.

First, let me offer more clarity about what I am defining as fruit. The journey starts with flowers. Thus fruits can, probably obviously, only come from flowering plants. But that still leaves a very broad territory.

(1) These flowers mature, in many species whether or not they were ever fertilized/pollinated, into some fleshy organ containing the seeds.

(2) The fleshy organ contain simple and/or complex sugars, as well as other nutrients (e.g. trace minerals).

(3) These coverings obviously played a major role in the development of symbiotic relationship with animals, who would eat the fruit, and deposit the seeds elsewhere, with the shells weakened by the digestive process, and the seeds deposited in the rich nutrient source that is manure. Of course, humans would eventually upgrade this to active cultivation. We, as well as at least some other animals, favored the sweeter, more flavorful varieties, and would participate in this symbiosis more readily with these. But it seems more evolutionarily plausible that the sugars and other nutrients, as well as any tough outer coverings, evolved originally to nurture and/or protect the developing plant. The sugars, etc would have enriched the proximate soil around the emerging seedling.

The point, really, is this last one. And there are really two parts of it.

One, fruits are not necessarily sweet in flavor. By the definition I'm using, at least, tomatoes, peppers, and squash are all fruits. We may use them like and call them vegetables, but that's not exactly correct. Vegetables are either leaf/stem material (which may also or instead be considered an herb), or root material (like the aforementioned ginger and turmeric roots). Seeds (whether used as food directly, spices, oil sources, or sources to grow more plants) are ultimately part of fruits, though they don't always have/include fruits exactly. Grains like wheat and barley have essentially bare seeds (sort of; one might argue that they are simply fruits we eat whole).

And this is what I mean. So far we have tomatoes, peppers, squash, and even possibly grains all as fruits. I would argue that beans, considered pod and all, are likewise fruits. In some case, such as snow peas, we even eat the pods. And in the event that beans sowed in wild conditions, it seems to me that the decaying pod would likely serve to feed the seeds it contains as they sprout and grow, whether or not it contained significant amounts of sugars.

But it goes further. Anyone who has ever helped harvest walnuts from a tree knows the pungent, fleshy coverings around the nuts that must ultimately be removed, usually covering those doing the removal with aromatic, sticky, tarry residue wherever they had to directly contact it.

Yeah, those are fruits. The fact that they are so tarry and sticky and aromatic should be a clue, even if they are not actually edible for humans or, as far as I know, other multicellular animals (I'm sure some microbes eat them).

Normally, even untended walnut trees will see plenty of animal symbiosis that bypass older causes for the development of the fruit around the nut, such as squirrels peeling off these walnut fruits to bury the nuts, partially to leech the tannins out of them to make them edible, partially to stock up for later. Of course, they don't keep precise memory of their stashes, and so end up sharing them collectively, whether or not any individual squirrel intended this, and they only consume a relatively small minority of the nuts they store like this, meaning the rest have a chance to sprout and grow new trees. And this, too, serves the squirrel population by producing more fruiting trees, whether or not any of them have any awareness of this or implicit intention in this direction.

Without this pre-existing layer of animal symbiosis, I suspect the fruit, still clinging to the nut, would fall, when successful, into some crevice of soil or other organic matter, where the fruit would naturally decay, and leave nutrients in the wake of this process to feed that specific seed. I suspect this is the evolutionarily older reason for the development of fruit, and that symbiosis was presumably not in any meaningful way planned by plants.

That said, I would recommend investigating for yourself the complex communications capacity of plants, through chemical signals through air, or through soil, and the many ways that they exhibit more of something like intelligence than most normally credit them with. There are some interesting documentaries out there to save you the effort of slogging through literature covering it.

There's no real point to this article, other than to point out that fruit is a broader category than most people realize, even when confined to those considered edible by humans.