Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Macadamia Nuts

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Macadamia nuts aren't nuts! They're seeds! And they are delicious. And good for you in the right amount. Learn all about them today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. Hey, welcome to Short Stuff.

I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry over there. This is Short Stuff about macadamia nuts. You heard me. Macadamia nuts. I love macadamia nuts. They're very oily and very rich.

And they are delicious, but they're the kind of nut that, and I find this with a lot of nuts for me. If you eat too many of them, you get a little, what do I call it, nut stomach. Yeah. Get a little, get a little nauseous, not nauseous, but just, you know, a sour belly. You can't see straight? Yeah. It's no good.

So where's your car? But I do love macadamia nuts, but they're not nuts like Brazil nuts. They are seeds. Yeah. And I was like, okay, what's the difference between nuts and seeds? It's hard to explain. Nuts are the fruit of the plant, and they're surrounded by a hard shell, and they actually contain seeds, and seeds are an actual tiny version of the plant itself, an embryo of

the plant, and it's surrounded by the seed coat, which nourishes the plant's food for the plant as it grows. That's right. And this one is chock full of good, and like dinner party factoids. And yes, I'm using Lord factoids. And chock full. So another one is, you think, oh, macadamia nuts, Hawaii, of course, is where these things first came from.

Sure. Like the number one brand of macadamia nuts is Mauna Loa, and if that's not Hawaiian, I don't know what is. Yeah. Well, a lot of them do come from Hawaii for a bunch of reasons, but they originated from our dear friends down under in Australia, and they were brought over by a man named William Purvis, he planted macadamia trees, which are nice looking, by the way. They are.

They're very pretty. He planted them on the big island in 1881 because they were growing a lot of sugar back then. I imagine they still grow a lot of sugar in Hawaii. And he wanted a windbreak. So he was like, these trees look nice, and they provide the windbreak that I need. So let me plant these things, and they don't produce nuts until they're four or five years old.

So to his delight, they bore a delicious yummy seed. So I saw that he wasn't around to see that the seed could be eaten, or at the very least to see it become popular. Oh, really? So he died within four or five years? No, no. But they didn't become popular until the 20s, about 40 years ago. Oh, sure.

That's what I mean. But surely they ate them, right? No. They genuinely don't know. I don't know when they figured it out. Interesting. But I guess some people had figured it out by about the turn of the century because in around 1900, the entire global coffee market collapsed because Bolivia, no, Brazil, ramped

up its production and overproduced, and so supply outstripped demand, and the prices just collapsed. And that was really bad for Hawaii because its economy was built in large part on coffee, too. Yeah. So they set up the Hawaiian Agricultural Experiment Station, which if it wasn't affiliated with the University of Hawaii back then, it is now. And they started saying, hey, you know what, the government will subsidize your land if

you start planting macadamia nuts. And they actually didn't have very many takers at first. No. You could get a five-year tax exemption, which is some pretty good dough. Sure. But I think it just, they didn't know that the world was going to go crazy for this stuff yet. Right.

So no one was throwing their hat in the ring. When they did find out that people like them, they really threw their hat in the ring. They, I think it says here from 1932 to 1938, production went up from 423 acres to over 1,000 acres in Hawaii, which I don't think we mentioned. The climate in Hawaii is just perfect for this stuff. That's why they grow it there. Yeah, right. So like the cultivars, which I didn't know this, but cultivar is actually a combination

of the words cultivated varieties. Did you know that? Yeah. I thought we talked about that in one of our foodie episodes. Maybe we did. No, it's just, it didn't stick with me, but so a cultivar is basically where we say, hey, we really like this plant that's native to Australia. We're going to really work it over and basically breed it into a different version of itself.

And that's what a cultivar is. And with the cultivars that have been used in Hawaii for a century or so now, they don't grow very well outside of Hawaii, which from what I can tell, I mean, if you read between the lines here, Hawaii has basically the market cornered on macadamia nuts, which is good for Hawaii and for Hawaii's macadamia nut farmers, but bad for the world because the global demand for macadamia nuts just keeps growing and it's not like the Hawaiian islands are growing anymore. So it's actually created a bit of a problem market-wise, which we'll talk about in a little

bit. All right. We'll be right back. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home.

Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the back of the 90s. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

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you get your podcasts. All right, so if you've ever been to the store, you're like, man, I want to crush up some sweet macadamia nuts, and I want to dredge my fish filet and that stuff and cook it up in the oven. You're like McDonald's filet of fish? No, no, no, no, no. Have you ever done that? It's really good.

Yes. I have, as a matter of fact, there's a restaurant chain called Roy's Hawaiian, and they have a macadamia-crusted fish that's really, really good. It's very delicious, very easy to do, but you might find that you're spending as much on your macadamia nuts as you are your fish, because it's expensive. They consider it what's called a dessert nut rather than what's called a commodity crop, like any old other dumb nut that you can just get tons and tons of. Or seed, because who can tell what's water anymore?

Sure, exactly. But here's the deal. I've got a few factors that go into why you already mentioned that they really have the market cornered in Hawaii, so that's a big deal. It takes seven years for a nut tree to produce a crop, so that's obviously going to drive up price some when you have to wait a long time for an output. We said like four to five earlier. It's somewhere between four and seven, I think.

Okay. Yeah, the person in the interview said seven years, but yeah, between four and seven. He may have been like inflating the numbers. Yeah, maybe so. Another thing is there are labor shortages in the agricultural field in Hawaii, so they're having to pay them more and pay them more benefits, so that's driving up cost. They're invasive pests that hit macadamias, the felted, coqued, cosid? I was going to say coxid.

Coxid? That's what I'm going with. That's going to drive up the price. The most important thing probably though is what you were alluding to, which is Hawaii's very expensive. The land is really expensive, and because you have to wait four to seven years to get a crop, it's just not feasible to expand all these orchards, so you're kind of like just don't have a ton of growth.

No, that's right. The production and supply is basically remaining steady while the demand goes up, which is how you get macadamia nuts that go for $25 a pound. That's a lot of money. Really, if you think about it, depending on the fish you're eating, it's maybe twice as much as that fish that you're using the macadamia nuts to crust. What, you think I'm bringing some trash tilapia in there? Garbage fish.

Garbage fish? I've heard tilapias are referred to as the rats of the sea. Have you ever heard that? No, but I definitely learned a lot over the years because in my younger days, I thought like tilapia was a very fancy thing. Yeah, I used to like it, and then I heard it called the rats of the sea, and I was like, I can't eat this anymore. Although seeing lobster called cockroaches of the sea didn't do much to thwart my love

of lobster. No, I'll take a buttered mayonnaise cockroach roll any day. Right, exactly. It's delicious. Yeah. So, our macadamia nuts, they're super high in calories and fat, but does that mean they're bad for you? No, no.

They're either very, very good for you, especially if they haven't been coated in delicious mazhi chocolate. Yeah, you don't need that stuff. No, you do. You do, but just don't count it as healthy. Have you ever had the mazhi chocolate-covered macadamia nuts? No, it is delicious, but I'm just saying, a macadamia nut to me isn't something you have to dress up to still be delicious.

Have you had the spam-dusted macadamia nuts? I think someone sent us those. Yes, and they're amazingly good. Yeah. Spam dust. But if you're just talking about just a plain old natural roasted macadamia nut, it actually is pretty good for you. They're very high in calories, but they also contain a lot of really good fats, monounsaturated

fats, which are the kind that actually lower your LDL cholesterol. That's right. They have a lot of carbs, but they also have a lot of fiber, and so anybody who's ever been on a keto diet like Atkins or something like that can tell you it's the net carbs that you care about. So you subtract the grams of fiber from the total grams of carbs, and you end up with net carbs, and those are the ones that you start counting. And apparently with macadamia nuts, the net carbs are actually fairly low.

And because they're high in carbs, the low in net carbs, that means the fiber in them, like plant fiber is among the best stuff you can eat. It keeps you so healthy, it keeps your gut microbiota happy and thriving. So apparently macadamia nuts are chock-full of them, as you would say. Yeah, they are also chock-full of vitamins and minerals, manganese, thiamine, copper. Yeah, which copper apparently aids in what? Some sort of transport and absorption. Oh, really?

Yeah, I can't remember what it was. It says in here, and I was like, I didn't know copper did that. God bless copper. I wonder people are stealing it from houses. Human absorption, which is good. Yeah, people do steal it, don't they, from like AC units or catalytic converter? Come on. Sure.

That's somebody else's catalytic converter. So chock-full of, despite being high in calories, chock-full of that good fiber, those good heart-healthy fats and proteins and vitamins and minerals, you still don't want to sit down and eat a bowl full of them, because like I said, they're very rich, but they say it's a good-filling nut, so if you grab a handful between meals or something, that's way better than eating potato chips or some, you know, processed, ultra-processed foods. Right, right. Yeah, and yeah, they'll keep you full like between meals or something.

Sure. You just made me think of like sitting down and eating an actual bowl full of macadamia nuts, and just like, you just start throwing up from overeating macadamia nuts, can you imagine? No. What a vile thing to do. We talked about the oil content, though. They are 72% oil, and I did not know this.

Here's another little factoid to finish us off. You can throw any nut into water, throw it in the toilet, and see if it floats, and if it's got 72% oil like that macadamia nut, it's going to float. Yeah, and if it doesn't, apparently they just go flush, flush them down the toilet. I don't think macadamia nuts are actually tested in a toilet. No, I don't think so either. I'm hoping not. Well, that's it for macadamia nuts, Charles.

I'm done. What about you, Jerry? Anything? Uh-uh-uh. That's right. Well, thank you for joining us on Short Stuff, Short Stuff Away. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

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