Unexpected Fruits

You know I just had to do it, go on about it. I mentioned some unlikely fruits. Cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, pumpkins, dates, strawberries, chili peppers, allspice, eggplant, lychee nuts, pepper, rosehips -- all fruits. Any gourd or melon, anything with a seed in it, that can be eaten. A fruit is, technically, an ovary. Yum. Sometimes it ripens into a shell, sometimes into something leathery or papery, sometimes into something juicy enough to recognize as a fruit. What's the big deal about fruit?

There is the large class of things with seeds. All fruits have seeds. All nuts have seeds. All nuts are fruits ... in a sense: with some nuts the part we would think of as the fruit, the ovary wall, is the shell, and we don't eat shells. A true nut is a type of seed where the actual "fruit" cannot be separated. Chestnuts and hazelnuts. Pretty small category, if we limit it the biological definition. But we shouldn't. A walnut is not a true nut -- the shell is separated and we eat the seed but not the fruit. Likewise, almonds, cashews, pistachios -- they are the seeds of nuts. But come on, they're nuts. A coconut is the seed of a nut.

As we loved to remind people when we were 12, bananas are legumes. But legumes are fruits. We eat the seed and toss the fruit, the peel, the pod. Same with peanuts. Peas, alfalfa, lentils, beans, carob -- legumes are fruits. Same with cereal grains, wheat, corn, rice -- they are technically fruits. The fruit wall is fused and uselessly thin, and what's edible is the seed, but they're fruit.

Nuts? They, like obvious fruits, have a strategy. For animals: eat my nuts, but forget about some that you hide so they will grow. With humans the strategy is just as easy: eat my nuts, notice how useful I am, and plant orchards of me. It's the same deal that fruit trees make. Philosophically we can think of them as fruit.

Regarding the Edenic diet then, of all the fruits of the trees, it seems that human food is anything a tree or vine or bush produces that can be eaten and isn't leaves, bark, or wood. Likewise with berries and gourds and melons, the fruit of the ground -- such vines and bushes are a subclass of fruit tree. Grains do not come from trees, of vines. They come from grasses. Just different. But they are fruit. Strange. The problem seems to be in the amount people eat. As for vegetables (the bodies of plants), and herbs (the leaves and twigs), the are edible, but not quite kosher, according to the dietary law of Eden. But we don't live in Eden.

Did you know that we have the gene to make vitamin C? We, and the higher primates. It's mutated though, and silent, and useless. Did our original primate ancestor have a bottleneck mutation, so that all resulting Evolved species and individuals inherited that damaging mutation? So this Evolutionist link would have it -- complete with a bunch of really super great reasons why he's right. An ignorant dogmatic religionist like myself is baffled by his cogency. I'm fuming. All I can come up with is the painful and obviously wrong and desperate canard, that there was a pandemic virus that attacked the vitamin C gene in all species that had a sufficiently close gene-design. Take your pick. I'm a little embarrassed with myself, about how stupid and blind and stubborn I am.

[I just can't resist. The entire Evolutionist argument here is undermined by the ugly fact that many of the passerine, perching/songbirds also have lost the ability to produce vitamin C, according to no intelligible supposed Evolutionary pattern. This invalidates the E-bottleneck assertion, and argues for a non-random mutagenic cause -- ie, one that attacks various but similar species. Just off the top of my head. After a google search of about 12 seconds. Pitiful. This is the religion that dominates the intellectual world. E-idiots. I don't mind their being wrong. At least be convincing. It's enough to make me start writing about Evolution again. Did I say, pitiful? Pitiful.]

The point is, we are not what we once were. Maybe there are vitamins that we don't even know about, that we used to get from some common food, a fruit from a tree of life, as it were. Now extinct, never recovered from the Flood. Some essential nutrient, for heart health, for brain function, for cancer repair. Perhaps the centuries-long lifespan of the patriarchs is not so fanciful, if we change a few assumptions or glean some new insights. Perhaps.

Conclusion? We live in an ad hoc world. We don't live by Eden's rules anymore. Now there is entropy, then there was none. Now mass extinctions corrupt what was meant to be an ideal orchard. We have to find our nutrients where we may. Because we too are not what we were made to be. Meat? Sure, if it's necessary. Grains? Likewise. Moderation in almost all things. We wouldn't want to eat just apples, either. Now, we don't have Divine rules to guide us. We've got to use some common sense -- which is not, alas, governed and guaranteed by appetite.

So we look at the nutritional content of a food, relative to the amount of calories and ease of digestion, and weigh that against taste, and get busy composing a livable, sustainable menu. You know, that's pretty smart. You should listen to me more, and do exactly as I tell you. You'll live almost a thousand years, I bet.

And buy my incredible Infinite Dinosaurs Program™!!! It's the bomb! And I'm offering a fantastic new revolutionary mega supplement energy drink that will hyper repair your genetic macro deficiencies!! Get it now, while supplies last!! E-bottleneck PrimaVita-C Mutation Negation Libation™!!! (Do not feed to canaries.) Act NOW!!!


J