Every Nut Explained

Every Nut Explained 🥜 Here is the strange truth behind the nut bowl: almost none of them are botanically nuts. This video walks fifteen of them — the almond, a stone fruit's pit and the source of bitter-almond cyanide, grown around 80 percent in California; the pili, a buttery Philippine nut from the volcanic slopes of Mayon; the cashew, which hangs beneath a fruit and hides a poison-ivy-related toxin in its shell; the Brazil nut, gathered only from wild Amazon rainforest and mildly radioactive; the peanut, a legume that buries its own pods underground; the pine nut, pried from pine cones and able to cause days of metallic "pine mouth"; the pistachio, the nut that splits its own shell and smiles; the acorn, the oak staple that must be leached of its tannins; the walnut, shaped like a brain and chemically at war with nearby plants; the chestnut, a starchy nut nearly wiped out by blight; the hazelnut, 70 percent Turkish and a quarter of it bought by the maker of Nutella; the macadamia, Australia's iron-shelled luxury nut that is toxic to dogs; the pecan, the only major nut native to North America; the coconut, a drupe the law still files as a tree nut; and the tiger nut, not a nut at all but a tuber our ancestors were eating two million years ago. Botany, chemistry, and a few quirks of evolution. Subscribe for more food explained.