Learning about edible plants (and eating them) has given me a lot of insight into the problems with the USAmerican food system

It's incredible how a supermarket gives you the sense of being surrounded by immense variety, but it's just the visual noise of advertising. In reality almost everything around you is just corn, wheat, soy, and milk, repackaged and recombined and concealed and re-flavored using additives, over and over and over again.

I'm also 10 billion times more Done with honest conversations about food having been totally obliterated by diet culture, the repugnant American emphasis on "personal choice," fatphobia, and veganism-the-ideology

The problem is not that Americans don't want to eat vegetables something something burgers obesity mcdonald's

The problem is that like 95% of the calories we PRODUCE in this country come from the same 6 or 7 crops/livestock that are easiest to minimize human labor in the production of, through automation and industrialization.

Americans eat so much ultra-processed food because it is easier for a corporation to shove a bunch of corn through 5 machines in a factory and dump additives in it, than to pay farmers and laborers for the highly skilled labor of raising a wide variety of crops and cultivars with the personal, non-mechanical, human attention that is required to grow every crop that you can't just floor with a combine harvester

Americans don't eat vegetables and fruits because vegetables and fruits in supermarkets are all of cultivars that taste like ass because they are bred to produce a lot (profitable) and be able to sit on a shelf for weeks after having the crap beat out of them being shipped in a truck. They're usually picked prematurely (so they can sit on a shelf for weeks) meaning they're unripe, mealy and sour, and half of them are approaching "actively rotting."

The main "plant based" meal that is served at almost any restaurant is a "salad" which means iceberg lettuce that looks like it was dragged across Texas by a bungee cord in a styrofoam cup of ice

We cannot make-better-choices our way out of just not having a variety of good quality food. Sure you can try to hork down the flaccid carrot sticks and strawberries that taste like pee on a tarp at a strawberry farm, but if you pretend to enjoy it everyone can see the pain in your eyes

It should be so damning of our food system that so many people legit think sugar is basically cocaine and that having access to candy and ice cream desensitizes your taste buds because they're being overwhelmed with an "unnatural" stimulus.

Buddy. You just...rarely have access to fruit that's actually fresh and ripe. Strawberries and apples aren't "sweet" in your head because the ones you've been eating usually taste like aquarium gravel.

That's so sad.

I'm just saying that one time I was lucky enough to eat ripe pawpaws in the woods still haunts me and I'm craving them just thinking about it

And sometimes you are lucky to pick up a perfectly ripe fruit from the walmart and those fruits are the fruits that live in your longing fantasies forever.

I literally still think about this one pineapple that I ate like 4 years ago I'm not even joking

I need y'all to know that "food you grew yourself tastes sooooooo much better" is not a metaphor for how hard work makes something more satisfying it Really Does Taste Way Better

Having developed MCAS, I can also say that it's INSANE how much those cheapest and least labor intensive foods are in everything.

This is my allergy list (needs to be updated too):

Peppers

Meat

Dairy

Eggs

Strawberries (OAS)

Gluten**

Corn**

Dye

Canola Oil

Sunflower Oil

Safflower Oil

Cottonseed Oil

Sesame Oil

Grapeseed Oil

Peanuts

Marcona Almonds

Green is rarely an ingredient, orange is middling, and red is in EVERYTHING.

I can't take injectable testosterone, too, because I'm allergic to every carrier oil. I just found out my meds all have dye or corn in them, except for my antihistamine. Regular Benadryl literally has red 40, the most common dye allergen!

I know it's only tangential to the point but like... beyond the fatphobia and diet culture stuff (which as a fat person I've been hit hard by and even abused over) it's also deeply ableist. They keep using the cheap options in everything that a lot of people are actively endangered by because they're passively eugenicist. Profits matter more than lives, so why would they bother making their food safe for any portion of the population but especially disabled people?

Anyway yeah, I'm also unlucky enough that I can't eat many fruits and veggies and even less processed grains, but I'd have so many more options if they'd just stop putting those few ingredients in EVERYTHING.

Damn yeah. Learning that Amaranth makes edible grains that are gluten free and can be made into flour or whatever you like made me so mad because when I looked it up it's like...a speciality health food ingredient

Like??? Amaranth is LITERALLY our worst agricultural weed. It's resistant to every herbicide we can invent because of our relentless attempts to destroy it. Easiest crop to grow on Earth because that shit REFUSES TO DIE. Amaranth is traditionally symbolic of Immortality and there's a reason for that.

The weed versions are different from the species that have been domesticated specifically for food, but they're still 100% edible and we have crap like CRISPR now, if Native Americans brute-forced teosinte into corn without the ability to even see by what means genetic information is stored and transmitted, we can make the seeds a bit bigger come on now

Market fresh

(at Pike Place Market) https://www.instagram.com/p/CQCiomfLDlp/?utm_medium=tumblr

Enjoy raspberries

Я фрукт! Ещё какой!…

Other people have added but that last part is idiomatic and emphasizes the first part so more accurately reads: “I am a fruit — and what a fruit I am!!”

How Food Looks Before It’s Harvested.

Sesame Seeds

Cranberry

Pineapple

Peanut

Cashew

Pistachio

Brussel Sprouts

Cacao

Vanilla

Saffron

Kiwi

Pomegranate

exactly 1 minute ago i had absolutely no idea what the plants sesame seeds and peanuts came from look like and i am shocked and surprised

for some reason every time I see pineapples growing I laugh out loud. Like, the punchline is it’s a pineapple!!!!!!!!! it’s a pineapple

An Interesting Fact About Peanuts, while we’re on the topic of food-plants:

Peanuts-you-eat grow underground, but they are NOT part of the peanut plant’s roots. Peanut plants are ambitious little fuckers and plant their seeds themselves. They flower like any perfectly reasonable legume, but once the flowers have been pollinated the plants do something called “pegging” (no really), in which they drill the stems where the flowers used to be into the ground. And that’s where the peanuts you eat form. Like so:

(src)

I’m going to pull myself together to endorse this Extremely Interesting Fact, but it’s going to be a real struggle

Ain’t botany fun?

Rachel Ruysch (Dutch, 1664 - 1750): A swag of grapes, hollyhocks, irises, mallow, African marigolds, clematis, a horse chestnut and blackberries with butterflies and other insects suspended before a stone arch (1681) (via Christie’s)

Microscopic photograph of the inside of a Vagina. How beautiful.

This the shit that make niggas not even pull out. This is it. Behold. Sweet sugar walls

This looks so fucking weird lmao but this actually makes sense because I’m pretty sure during arousal they move around and guide the sperm towards the cervix. ISNT ANATOMY COOL???????????

I thought that was pulp. I thought this was some kinda delicious, juicy fruit. This is a vagina. That’s pussy pulp.

I thought these were bugs or something, this is so cool

Ummm 😳 ok wow

This is amazing.

Wooweeee ☺️

this is the inside of a fucking fig

date of origin: 2015

This a Moonmelon, scientifically knows as asidus. This fruit grows in some parts of Japan, and is known for its vibrant blue color. What you probably don’t know about this fruit is that it can switch flavors after you eat it. Everything sour will taste sweet, everything salty will taste bitter, and it gives water a strong orange-like taste. It’s also very expensive…costing about ￥16000 JPY (which is about 200 dollars).

or you know this could be photoshopped

but idk

you tell me

this is alexandrias melon (wow)

it never grows seeds but it can still produce other melons (its magic)

it is grown deep in the jungles of peru and can prevent you from aging well into the hundreds

it is known by the natives there as k’uhul ajaw cacao shi-jiiy.

its really strange how all of these pictures look exactly the same because everything on the internet is true

This is the Peppermeloni. (seriously gosh just look at that sexy mother fucker) Its scientific name is Tumblrous Pepperonus.

The only known specimen is in a pot in David Karps treasure dungeon. It is a tradition that a single slice is given to every tumblr blog that reaches 500,000 followers.

It has the remarkable property of being as healthy as watermelon but tasting like cheesy pepperoni pizza.

This planet is really just so amazing guys wow.

Patrickmelon

The taste of this melon will always surprise you.

I’m fucking done with this site

This is the evermelon.

If you cut this watermelon a certain way you will find that it has seemingly regenerated. You can do this an infinite number of times and will have a neverending supply of melon.

OH GOD I haven’t seen this post in YEARS and THAT is the fucking additon to it!?

ALRIGHT THATS IT ITS TIME TO STOP

Hi my name is Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Ravenmelon and I’m ebony black  (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips, and a lot of people tell me I look like watermelons (AN: if u don’t know what dat is get da hell out of here!).

Nothing will ever be better than the last one

HASHBFJGJDHRJFKFKRJ

That last one took me out at the god damn kneecaps-

Someone wrote a really interesting article about why people believe these sorts of things so easily.

Wow. That explains…a lot, actually.

I LIVE for “how is X a social construct argle bargle!!1!!!1????” takedowns.

So you know that post of mine about the difference between observed facts and constructed models?  This is another perfect example, because the question of whether or not we call something a “fruit” depends on which model we’re using: botanical or culinary.

Cooks are not wrong for putting zucchini and celery and onion and carrot all in the same category called vegetable while putting cherry and strawberry and rhubarb together in a different category called fruit.  And botanists are not wrong for taking those same items and grouping zucchini, cherry, and strawberry together as fruits, celery and rhubarb together as stalks, and onion and carrot together as roots.

(And for those of us who grew up with the Jewish religious tradition of saying different blessings on different kinds of food, there’s yet another categorization: fruit that grows from trees, and fruit-or-other-produce that grows from the ground.  Of the above foods listed, only the cherry goes in the first category.  Our criteria for categorizing doesn’t match either culinary or botanical, and we’re not wrong either.)

Categories are useful – sometimes crucial, even – but it is deeply important to remember that we invented them and we can change them or throw them out whenever they stop being useful.

Johanna Puhl on Instagram

Fruity Booty Pins / Rah Rah Roots Charms

Papricots on Etsy

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Fruit Dragons by Alexandra Khitrova.

never not reblog the fruit dragons

Coconut boi is so pure

So wholesome

Forever reblog I love these great job Khitrova ❤❤❤👏👏👏👏❤❤❤👏👏👏👏