Curated playlist
Edible nuts and seeds
- WalnutA walnut shell grit clog helped bring down a US Army helicopter. The 1982 Chinook crash ended its aviation use.
- AlmondThe almond is not a nut, but a stone fruit related to the peach and the plum. The part we eat is its seed.
- BeechBeech trees gave English its word for book. Old Runic tablets were carved from beech wood.
- PumpkinThe carved Halloween pumpkin began as a carved turnip. Irish and Scottish lanterns used turnips before pumpkins.
- HickoryHickory trees once grew across the whole Northern Hemisphere. Ice erased the genus from Europe entirely.
- Nut (fruit)Peanuts are not nuts, at least not to a botanist. They are legumes, unlike hazelnuts, chestnuts and acorns.
- Cocoa beanThe cocoa bean, the dried and fermented seed of the cacao tree, once paid for rabbit dinners in Mesoamerica. Before the Spanish conquest, it served as common money across the region. Beans bought small items such as tamales and rabbit…
- PeanutThe peanut, Arachis hypogaea, buries its own fruit, and its Latin species name means "under the earth." In 2023 the world produced 54 million tonnes of peanuts, with China supplying 36 percent of the total and India 19 percent. The plant…
- Mustard seedA grieving mother searched a village for mustard seeds from a home untouched by death.
- ChestnutChestnut trees belong to the genus Castanea, and the most famous of them grows on the slopes of Mount Etna. The Hundred Horse Chestnut measured 57.9 metres, or 190 feet, in circumference in 1780. By 1883 the figure had reached 64 metres.…
- Areca nutThe areca nut is chewed by around 600 million people, mainly of South and Southeast Asian origin. It leaves red stains on pavements from South Asia to the northern Philippines. This seed of a tropical palm, also called betel nut, acts as a…
- HazelnutA pit on the Scottish island of Colonsay held hundreds of thousands of burned hazelnut shells.
- Juglans regiaWitches were said to gather at a walnut tree in Benevento, Italy. A judge wrote about them in 1526.