FACTORALY - E27 NUTS

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Nuts are some of the best and healthiest foods there are - even if they're not always technically nuts! This episode goes into the different types of foodstuff that we call nuts, and explains why some of them aren't nuts at all.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello. Hello. Hello, Bruce. Hello, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling pretty good. Are you? Yeah.

That's wonderful to hear. I'm healthy because I'm eating well. Are you? I am. What good. Are you? That's wonderful to hear. I'm healthy because I'm eating well. Are you? I am. What specific things are you eating? Well one of the things I'm eating is quite a lot of nuts. Okay. I think I'm eating nuts anyway. Well you would hope that you would know whether you're eating nuts or not. Well this is the thing, so today's episode we're going to be talking about nuts. Oh, what a coincidence. Isn't that wonderful? But a lot of nuts aren't nuts. No. They kind of fall into three different groups. There are nuts, there are legumes, and there are droops.

I just love the word droops. And droops specifically spelt D-R-U-P-E-S. Yes. As opposed to Droops. As a double O. Yes. Okay, so can you tell us the difference in a nutshell? I knew you were going to say that. Yes, I can.

So a nut is a hard shell containing only one fruit. Okay. So, for example, a walnut is a nut because it's a hard shell that contains only one fruit. So for example a walnut is a nut because it's a hard shell that contains only one fruit. Yes. A legume is a shell that

contains more than one fruit. So it comes in a pod. So like a peanut contains two peanuts in a pod. So like a peanut contains two peanuts in a pod. Yes. And a droop is a seed that's contained within a hard shell, within something soft and fruititious.

Congratulations on the use of fruititious there. That's charming. Yes. Okay, so it's confusing. I read very similar definitions to what you've just said. I found that an awful lot of foodstuffs sort of cross over into different categories. And there are things in some categories

that you really don't think should be there. Yes. But cashews and peaches are in the same family. They're both, by your explanation just there, drupes, aren't they? aren't they they are so a peach or anything that has a hard stone it's just about what we do with it we focus on the sweet fleshy bit and we throw away the hard thing in the middle but a cashew or a cashew depending on how you're disposed i'm a cashew you're a cashew i'm a cashew. You're a cashew. I'm a cashew. Bless you.

Cashews have a soft, fruity outer which gets thrown away, and all we know of the cashew is the hard, nutty bit inside. It's kind of inside. It actually hangs down from the bottom. If you look at a cashew, it's like a pear. If you can imagine a pear with a very large cashew nut, like black underneath it, that's kind of what large cashew nut, like black underneath it. Yeah.

That's kind of what a cashew nut looks like. Oh, I see. Interesting. And you can eat the pear bit. It's quite nice. Is it? But don't eat the cashew because the outside is poisonous. Crikey. There's a lot of trial and error involved in that, isn't there?

Yeah. You can imagine someone seeing this thing growing on a tree for the first time. Let's try this bit. Ooh. Let's try this bit. You have that bit there and I'll have this bit here and we'll see how we do yes i have never given any kind of thought whatsoever as to how nuts are processed i go to the pub i open a small bag and ta-da, there are nuts inside. Yes.

I've never given any kind of thought as to how these things are harvested, opened, cooked, anything like that. Or even where they grow. I mean, I always thought that peanuts grow on trees. But then the word groundnut should have kind of given me a clue. Groundnut, is that another name for a peanut? It is. Ah. But they grow underground.

Underground? Underground. I thought you were going to suggest that they sort of grew in a trailing vine along the ground. Yes, apparently they grow underground. So you dig up peanuts. You dig up peanuts. Who knew? Well, I didn't.

I didn't. We may be wrong, but people can tell us. Yes, they can. I mean, we're on a constant journey of learning ourselves, just like anyone else. If we've got this completely wrong, do tell us. We're humble. We're really humble. We're incredibly humble. We're so humble. We're the most humble people ever. I looked into the health benefits of lots of nuts because people say nuts are good for you. They do say that. I'll do a little bit on each one that we go through okay um peanuts are good for you because

they contain uh tryptophan right which is something a bit like serotonin so it helps you to sleep oh really so if a handful of peanuts before you go to bed could help you to sleep better okay is that offset by the fact that i only eat salted peanuts, which are absolutely slathered in salt and oil. Yes, that would keep you awake. So we're talking about the pure, raw, basic peanut in its natural form. Yes. Right. Yeah. We'll come back to peanuts later.

Oh, I'm sure. So peanuts are a legume. I know. What's an almond, do you reckon? Almonds, by the definition we've given, I think they are droops. I think they're in the same family as cashews. Correct. They given, I think they are drupes. I think they're in the same family as cashews. Correct, they are.

Yes, almonds are drupes. Interestingly about almonds, 80% of all almonds in the world come from California. Do they really? They do. Now, I don't like almonds. I don't like anything that's connected with almonds. So I don't like marzipan. I don't like cherry bakewells. I don't really like am's connected with almonds. So I don't like marzipan. I don't like cherry bakewells.

I don't really like amaretto or anything like that. But apparently almonds are some of the oldest cultivated foods around. Almonds are mentioned specifically in the Old Testament of the Bible. And it is one of the first written records of a specific food deliberately being cultivated for food. And these things have been found in excavation sites in Greece. Marzipan was potentially, depending on which records you listen to, first brought to this country by crusaders returning from the Holy Lands and found this delicious almond paste and brought it back with them. I can't stand the stuff.

There are some which are tree nuts. Okay. Like a walnut is a tree nut. Yes, okay. Or a chestnut. Chestnuts, exactly. Acorns are a tree nut. Yes, of course.

It's just that we know not to eat them. Yes, we do. We do. Beach nuts, also a tree nut. OK. What about Brazils? Brazils are quite interesting. Only about 2% of Brazil nuts come from Brazil.

Most of them come from Bolivia. Oh, really? Yes. So maybe they should rename Bolivia. No, maybe not. Would you like some Bolivia nuts? Doesn't sound right. Brazil nuts are quite heavy and they harvest them by

shaking a tree. Yeah. And about six people a year are killed or injured by falling Brazil nuts. Oh my goodness. That's quite a lot. I mean there are other tree nuts that you kind of,

like a macadamia nut is quite a hard nut as well. Right. The shell is like five times harder than a hazelnut shell. It's a really tough shell. Good grief, wow. And you can't get into a macadamia nut. I mean, the shell is like almost as light and strong like aluminium, which is quite interesting.

But you can't harvest macadamia nuts you just have to wait for them to fall off the tree when they're ripe because otherwise you'll never get into them oh really they're that tough well have you seen how brazil nuts grow no i haven't so they they basically they come in pods with all of these things like i said earlier i i give no thought about how these things are grown or harvested or anything like that um i just imagine individual brazil nuts hanging on a tree i guess um but they grow in pods they there are about 15 well between 15 and 30 individual brazil nuts yeah growing in a pod it kind of looks like the segments of an orange. Okay. And these pods are large, obviously, 15 to 30 nuts. That would explain how they kill people.

Well, yes, exactly, yeah. So these pods weigh between four and six pounds each. Wow, okay. So if one of those falls off a tree, yeah, I can totally understand how that would cause injury. The first reference of a Brazil nut dates back to 1569 when a Spanish officer found these nuts in Brazil and used them to feed his troops

and then brought them back to Europe with them. Fascinating. Indeed. So pecans are the only fresh fruit that astronauts get. Really? Yeah. Why? Because one handful of pecans has all your daily requirement of B1, zinc, potassium, magnesium, vitamins A and E.

Ah, OK. They are so rich in everything. A handful of pecans will see an astronaut through a day. Right. I can't look at a pecan without thinking of that line from the film When Harry Met Sally. Pecan pie. Hopefully there's at least one other person listening to this who knows what I'm talking about. So nuts have obviously been around since forever.

And it turns out that human beings have been eating them for quite a long time as well. There was an archaeological dig in Israel where people found traces of quite a few different types of nuts. I think it was about seven or eight different types of nuts in this one particular dig. And they aged the things that they found in this dig, along with some tools and other bits and bobs, 780,000 years old. So people have been eating nuts for quite a long time.

Yeah. Are you allergic to nuts? That's a good question. Probably not. Okay. I only ask because I know that you have an allergy for, is it dragon fruit and strawberries and things like that? Dragon fruit. So I have developed in recent years an allergy to certain fruits. I don't know whether I'm allergic to the thing itself or

if I'm allergic to the thing that they coat the thing in, the pesticides and things like that. Any cooked nuts, totally fine. As I mentioned, I can go and have a bag of honey roast cashews or dry roast peanuts or anything like that. Absolutely fine. I seem to have a little bit of a scratchy throat with raw nuts as as they were intended right to be eaten because there's there's an interesting i mean people who have a pollen allergy often are allergic to hazelnuts okay right which is something that you might find um and people with peanut allergies even if it's very mild you often find things like stone fruit, like apricots, will make your mouth feel a bit fuzzy.

Yes. Kiwis occasionally have that effect. Sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, rice seeds, some of those seeds, they have a very similar makeup to the bit of allergen that is in peanuts. I see. I do have problems with cherries and stone fruits and things like that, yeah.

But that doesn't explain my issue with bananas. But peanuts are the one that gets all the headlines. They do, don't they? Yeah. But peanuts are fabulous.

For a jar of peanut butter there's about 540 peanuts in a jar of peanut butter. Really? Yeah. Now this is going to be the test of peanut butter, there's about 540 peanuts in a jar of peanut butter. Really? Yeah. Now, this is going to be the test of our friendship, Bruce. Chunky or smooth? Well, the research suggests that females prefer smooth and males prefer crunchy.

Is that right? Yes. I prefer crunchy. I prefer crunchy. There's a specific peanut butter that is no longer made, which is very annoying, which is Skippy Honey Roast peanut butter. Oh, that sounds nice. I've actually got stock of it in my basement because I knew that they were going out of business.

I bought a couple of trays of peanut butter. Wow. Most peanuts come from China. Oh, do they really? About 8% of all global production of peanuts comes from China. Oh, do they really? About 8% of all global production of peanuts comes from China. Wow. There's about 47 million metric tons of peanuts produced per year. Whoa.

That is a lot of peanuts. It's a lot. It's a lot of peanuts. And there have been lots of famous people who grow peanuts. Two presidents of the United States were peanut farmers. Really? So Jimmy Carter's the one that I can remember as being the peanut farmer. Right.

But Thomas Jefferson was a peanut farmer. Is that right? Huh. One of the people who really loved peanuts was John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the cornflake. John Harvey Kellogg thought that peanuts were so good and so high in protein, they would make a very good meat replacement. Oh, okay. So he started to crush them up and turn them into

peanut butter. Let me tell you about peanut butter. Please do. Well, actually, let me tell you about peanut butter and jelly. PB&J. PB&J. So peanut butter and jelly, that's one of the reasons why um americans eat so many more peanuts than we do because they they reckon that um the average uh american citizen

will have eaten about 3 000 pbjs in their lifetime wow that's um yeah that's quite a few that is quite quite a lot of pb and j's um elvis presley had a favorite one That is quite a lot of PB&Js. Elvis Presley had a favourite one, which actually was a PB&B, which is a peanut butter and banana. Oh, crikey. Oh, that sounds disgusting. Yeah. The biggest ever PB&J. Yes.

I know we like these facts. We do. Was made in Grand Saline in Texas. Biggest peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Weighed 1,342 pounds. Good grief. That's a big sandwich. Actually, while we're on the subject of

records, how far do you think you can throw a peanut? I need parameters. Tell me, what are the wind conditions like? What's the elevation of the terrain? Exactly. How tall are you? I think for a Guinness record, that has to be sort of like set. I'm not sure what they are. Right.

124.4 feet. That's quite far, isn't it? Presumably without any means of propulsion. That's just pure arm power. I would guess. I mean, a slingshot would be a bit of a cheat. That would be cheating, wouldn't it? Yeah.

You could easily smash that. Or would it be a flick, maybe? would be a bit of a cheat. That would be cheating, wouldn't it? You could easily smash that. Would it be a flick, maybe? Could be a flick. I'm picturing sort of holding a peanut between your thumb and forefinger and then flicking it with the other hand, sort of like an American football. Yeah, but 124 feet. I mean, that's a long way. That's a good job.

Well done. When I was reading about peanuts, I hadn't even factored in the peanut butter element. That totally explains why peanuts are so prevalent, let alone being a bar snack. Of course, the peanut butter is going to sway that. I read somewhere that peanuts account for two thirds of the world's nut consumption. Wow. So of all the other nuts that exist, peanuts, just on their own, are two thirds of all of that nut market.

And they grow, although you said China is the biggest single producer of peanuts, they grow a certain number of them in America, as I would imagine that America is probably one of the biggest consumers, and therefore it makes sense that they would grow them as well. There's a place called Dothan, or Dothan, not sure, in Alabama, which is known locally, not by the rest of the world, known locally as the peanut capital of the world. And this town, along with many others, have an annual peanut festival. In which, other than an awful lot of peanuts being consumed, obviously, it's a three-day event.

They have a peanut parade, a peanut pageant. They have a peanut masked ball. They have a peanut play. And this entire festival goes on for three days in celebration of the humble peanut. Isn't that lovely? I want to go there. I don't. I really don't. Can you imagine being somebody with a peanut allergy and you accidentally show up? Just riding through town and all of a sudden your throat gets a little bit itchy. what's going on here that would be horrible there are so many records around nuts i had to stream this down an awful lot my favorite guinness world record that i found regarding nuts

was uh the most uh the most walnuts cracked in one minute with the head. What, you nut a nut? You nut a nut, yes, exactly. Wow. There was a gentleman called Naveen Kumar who managed to crack 273 walnuts with his head in one minute, which works out as roughly four and a half walnuts per second. Sorry, four? Okay. So you'd have to be doing more than one at a time with your head then?

I assume so. Apparently there's a video of this online I haven't looked yet. I will find it and put it on the blog. Thank you. I can only assume he's actually laying walnuts on a table and then banging his forehead against the table. That's the only way I can think of getting that number of nuts done in that amount of time. My dad showed me how to crack a walnut using your bare hands, which is quite interesting.

Oh, OK. What you do is you get two walnuts rather than just one. You can't just squeeze a walnut to get cracks. So if you get two walnuts together and then crack them against each other, then they crack. Very good. There are funny names for things like filberts. Do you know what a filbert is? A filbert is another name for a hazelnut, isn't it? Correct, yes. But I don't know why.

No, I don't know either. So hazelnuts, my primary experience of hazelnuts again i'm not particularly keen on them in their their raw form but mix them in with cocoa powder and palm oil and stick them in a jar and call it nutella ah of course one of my favorite foodstuffs in the world sit me down with a jar of nutella and a spoon and I'm a happy boy. Don't Ferrero make Nutella? I think they use about half of all the hazelnuts in the world or something. It's a lot. It's somewhere between a quarter and a half of the world's hazelnut supply.

They use more than 100,000 tonnes of hazelnuts every year. Wow. And Ferrero obviously make Ferrero Rocher, the chocolate that has a whole hazelnuts every year wow and ferrero obviously make ferrero roche the chocolate that has a whole hazelnut in the middle and chopped hazelnuts around the edge yes um ferrero also make nutella as previously mentioned which is just i love it i love it too and they make tic tacks ferrero make tic tacks yeah really yeah and And Ferrero is owned by one family. It used to be just one guy. Mr Ferrero? Yeah. Or Mr Rocher. I think it's Mr Ferrero. It's an Italian company. Yes. Based in Alba in Italy. Yes. I'm sure hazelnuts are consumed in other ways, but for my liking,

that's the best way to serve a hazelnut. We talked about the uses of nuts. You can also use it as soap, apparently. OK. If you find yourself stuck somewhere with a bunch of walnuts and no soap, what you do is you grind up the walnut shells very fine into a powder and they make a really good soap.

Do they? They do. I feel I've heard this somewhere before. No, do you know what I'm thinking of? The cleaning episode. I talked about soap nuts. Oh, you did, didn't you? Yes.

Which aren't nuts. Neither are they soap. No. And there's exfoliation, but they don't use bits of nuts in exfoliation soap either, do they? Wouldn't have thought so. Do you know about the smiling nut? The happy nut? No.

OK, I mean, there's nothing else to say. There's a couple of things one can say about pistachios. But they are known in China as the happy nut and in Iran as the smiling nut. And if you ever look at a pistachio, it's got a smile. Of course it has. Now, isn't that an interesting point of perspective? Whenever I crack open a pistachio nut, and pistachios are one of my favourite things to eat in a pub,

purely because there's a process to it, it's an activity, it's something that you can all do at the table, and it takes time and it's enjoyable, regardless of the fact that pistachios are yummy. Whenever I split a pistachio, I picture having the crack in the shell vertically. I have never thought of turning it sideways. Now that I've done that in my mind's eye,

of course it looks like a smile. Wow. Oh, the other way. Do you know how to crack pistachios very easily? I was shown by a guy from Iran. How to crack a pistachio really fast and easy is you take a half shell of a previously cracked pistachio, insert it in the crack in the new pistachio and twist.

And twist. That's great. And that opens the pistachio. Even the ones that have like a very, very fine crack that you think, I'd never get my fingernails in there. Yes. You can get a half shell in there and just twist it and crack it in a pistachio. That's great.

They're green. The green in a pistachio is the same green as you get in kale so the color of a pistachio is actually means a pistachio is quite good for you oh i see right right again unsalted and roasted probably yeah i mean you know you can process the salt away. Yes. Talking of almonds, you know that to actually make almonds in the almond trees, you need an insect to help you to do that. Do you? And the insect that you need is bees.

Almonds need bees. I was talking to an apiarist recently. Who doesn't have a regular conversation with an apiarist? Yes, who was telling me some very useful things about how to, if a bee lands on you, like if it lands on your arm, stick your arm in the air because bees go uphill. Is that true? Yes. It's the way they move bees from one place to another is they put them like there's a hive and they put like a little gangplank going up from the bottom up into the. And they basically release the bees onto the gangplank and the bees walk up. Brilliant. Into the hive.

Brilliant. And they are responsible for reproducing almonds. So the reason why bees are essential for the production of almonds is that they love the pollen from almond blossoms. And the pollen from an almond blossom contains the amino acids that bees like. And the nectar, it's basically got stuff in it which reduces the viruses and gut parasites that attack bees.

Oh, I see. So if you get a bee in an almond orchard, they will always leave the orchard stronger. Right, OK. Wow. So we've gone nuts about nuts, haven't we? Sorry, we've gone nuts about legumes and drupes and seeds and berries and nuts. And nuts, yes.

I'll tell you what, I'll put a list on the blog to show you which is which. Good idea, that would be very useful. So when you're in a bar or something, would you like some nuts? And you go, what have you got? And they go, I've got pistachios. And they're drupes. Almonds? Drupes.

Peanuts? Legumes? They will love you if you go into an establishment and do that please take a video of the results and send it to us well that's all i've got on nuts yes i think i'm also uh completely out of of nut related facts i've drooped off the end of my list of facts. I've had a cracking good time. It's been a shell of a show. So. So there we go. That is another episode of Fact Orally. Please like us, subscribe to us, comment on us,

go and have a look at the show notes on our website. And tell your friends. Thank you ever so much for listening. We've thoroughly enjoyed this one. And we hope you have too. If you have, please come again. If you haven't, please come again. It might be better next week. Exactly.

Until then, cheerio. Goodbye.