Happy Thought for Friday, 10 June, 2022

Have a Happy Thought: 


Yep, I'm resuming your regularly-scheduled weekly dose of awww-ful... or awe-ful... or, occasionally, awful.


Just a reminder that if you also get my emails directly, you'll be getting these twice - so you may want to unsubscribe from one (or both, that's fine) lists.


You may, at one point, have heard that a lot of the fruits that we call "berries" are not actually berries, botanically speaking. Raspberries, for example, are actually an aggregate of drupes.


What the &#*@ is a drupe, you ask?

Delicious, is my answer!


Drupes are fruit where there is an outer fleshy bit that surrounds a shelled seed. The delicious thing about drupes is that the outer fleshy bit is there to be, well, delicious! It's not a source of energy for the seed, it's actually evolved to be eaten by an animal, so that the seed can be dispersed along with some... natural fertilizer.


Some of my favourite drupes are:

  • Peaches
  • Nectarines
  • Avocados
  • Coffee (goes without saying)
  • Almonds (although we actually eat the inner seed, not the outer fleshy bit)
  • Raspberries (aggregate of drupelets)
  • Blackberries (ditto)
But the one that really blew my mind when I learned it is a drupe is... coconut!

Let's talk about the parts of a drupe, and you'll see why coconuts are so weird.

Here's a peach, showing the different parts of a drupe. Normally, we eat the Pericarp parts, especially that delicious sweet mesocarp.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupe#/media/File:Drupe_fruit_diagram-en.svg 


Now imagine a coconut, that's just been plucked from a tree. It's got a thin outer shell (exocarp), and within that this really fibrous material (mesocarp, or husk). you pull all of that away and you're left with the really hard shell that you have to crack, to get into the coconut flesh. In other words, you have to strip off the entire pericarp, and what you would buy in say a supermarket is only the seed. The seed coat is then that really hard shell that you have to crack open to get to the deliciousness inside.


Image: James St John on Flickr, https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/39384972311, cc-by-2.0.


But then, where is the actual seed, you know, the thing that would turn into a new plant (in the peach diagram above, we're talking the Endosperm)?


The endosperm - the seed - is.... liquid. 

Yes, liquid seed!

Coconut water (or milk), which is technically acellular endosperm, or nuclear endosperm (anyone need a name for your garage band?), meaning it's just nuclei floating around in cytoplasm... and that's what we drink. 


So the next time you are cooking with coconut water, or drinking some coconut milk, or getting a massage with coconut oil, remember that drupes are:

a) delicious

b) weird

c) coconuts are weird even for drupes

d) still delicious



Thanks to the Completely Arbortrary Podcast for sharing all about drupes... and pomes and all sorts of tree nuts and seeds and cones, and for getting me through countless kms on the trail! https://arbortrarypod.com/ 

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