50 Fun Facts About Nuts

Botanically, the peanut belongs to which plant family?

Peanuts grow like peas and beans, not like tree nuts. They even fix nitrogen in the soil through bacteria in their root nodules.

Peanut pods develop underground, a rare trait known by what name?

After pollination a stalk called a peg grows down into the soil, and the pod forms there. Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, Greek for under the earth.

Which company made peanut butter famous by selling it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair?

Peanut butter was first manufactured in Canada under an 1884 US patent held by Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal.

Which US president was a peanut farmer from Sumter County, Georgia?

Georgia leads the nation in peanut production with about 49 percent of the country's peanut acreage and output.

Which scientist promoted hundreds of peanut-based products in the American South?

He pushed peanuts as a rotation crop for soils exhausted by cotton, and his product list ran from cosmetics to paints to nitroglycerin.

The oldest known peanut pods, about 7,600 years old, were found in which country?

Dry conditions there preserve organic material. The Moche and other pre-Columbian cultures depicted peanuts in their art.

Which mold can contaminate drought-stressed peanuts and produce carcinogenic aflatoxins?

The USDA tests every truckload of raw peanuts; any lot over 15 parts per billion is destroyed or diverted to oil, where the mold can be removed.

Which US state produces roughly 80% of the world's almond supply?

Heavy water and pesticide demands have raised sustainability concerns there, and repeated droughts have pushed some growers out of the industry.

The almond tree is a close relative of which fruit, sharing the subgenus Amygdalus?

An almond fruit is a drupe with a hull and a hard shell around the seed, so the almond you eat is not a true nut.

Bitter almonds are dangerous because they can release which toxin when eaten?

About 50 bitter almonds could be lethal for an adult, and as few as 5 to 10 for a child. All almonds sold as food in the US are sweet cultivars.

Which sweet confection made from ground almonds features prominently in desserts?

Almonds were among the earliest domesticated fruit trees because quality trees could be grown straight from seed, without cuttings or suckers.

Which country led world almond production in 2024 with about 51% of the total?

Two southern-hemisphere and Mediterranean growers were the secondary producers, and one of them posted a record A$1.3 billion crop value in 2024-25.

The cashew nut hangs below a swollen, pear-shaped accessory fruit called the cashew what?

That colourful structure is an accessory fruit that develops from the flower stalk. The kidney-shaped drupe hanging below it is the true fruit.

Cashew shells contain an irritant chemically related to the toxin in which plant?

The shell resin can cause contact dermatitis, which is why cashews are essentially never sold in the shell to consumers.

Explorers from which country carried the cashew from South America to India in the 1500s?

The tree is native to tropical South America, yet by 2023 the biggest harvests were in West Africa and South Asia.

Which African country led the 2023 global cashew harvest alongside India?

Global output was 3.9 million tons that year. Dwarf cultivars around 6 metres tall are the most profitable because they mature sooner.

A pistachio tree may live up to how many years?

Orchard trees take 7 to 10 years to reach significant production, and the plants are dioecious, with separate male and female trees.

What happens to a ripe pistachio shell that humans deliberately selected for?

Botanists call the splitting dehiscence. The shell also shifts from green to an autumnal yellow-red as the fruit ripens.

The word pistachio ultimately derives from a Middle Persian word meaning what?

The trail runs through Greek pistákion, Latin, Italian pistacchio and Old French before reaching English. The same root gives us pesto.

Which three countries produced about 87% of the world's pistachios in 2024?

World output was about 1.4 million tonnes. Pistachio is a desert plant that tolerates salty soil and can survive from -10 to 48 degrees Celsius.

The Persian or English walnut, Juglans regia, originally comes from which country?

The black walnut is native to eastern North America, and the Japanese walnut is also known as the heartnut.

Which compound in walnut husks, at 2 to 4% fresh weight, stains hands and irritates skin?

Walnut trees are also notoriously late to leaf out, often not until more than halfway through spring.

Which country produced about 35% of the world's walnuts in 2023?

Total production was four million tonnes in shell. Collectors there also prize large carved wenwan walnuts, rotated in the hand as a plaything.

Macadamia trees are native to which country?

It is the only widely grown food plant that is native there, and it was an important bushfood for Aboriginal peoples long before orchards.

Which place was the world's largest macadamia producer for more than a century?

Seeds were first imported there in 1882 by William H. Purvis. South Africa has been the largest producer since the 2010s.

The genus Macadamia was named in 1857 in honour of John Macadam, who was what?

Botanist Ferdinand von Mueller did the naming. Macadam was also a medical teacher and politician in Victoria.

A macadamia shell has mechanical properties similar to which metal?

Cracking one takes roughly 2,000 newtons of force, and the shell is about five times harder than a hazelnut shell.

Brazil nuts are famous for an unusually high amount of which mineral?

A single 28-gram serving of six to eight nuts averages about ten times the daily value, though batches vary widely.

Brazil nuts can hold traces of which radioactive element, concentrated by the roots?

A kilogram may register 40 to 260 becquerels. The dose is small, but it is higher than in common foods.

Which large rodent gnaws open Brazil nut capsules and buries seeds that later sprout?

Buried seeds can lie dormant for years until a tree falls and sunlight reaches the forest floor.

Together with Brazil, which country produced most of the world's Brazil nuts in 2024?

Brazil nut trees fruit almost only in undisturbed forest, because logged areas lack the large-bodied bees that pollinate the flowers.

A Brazil nut fruit and its shell together can weigh as much as how much?

The tree itself reaches about 50 metres tall and can live 500 years or more, making it one of the giants of the Amazon.

Which country produced 57.7% of the world's hazelnuts in 2023?

Depending on species, hazelnuts are also called cobnuts or filberts. They flavour praline, Frangelico liqueur and chocolate spreads.

Evidence of 8,000-year-old hazelnut roasting was found on an island in which country?

A midden pit on Colonsay held hundreds of thousands of burned shells, radiocarbon dated to around 6000 BCE.

Pecan is the official state tree of which US state?

It is also the state nut of Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. Like all hickories, the pecan is technically a drupe.

The word pecan comes from which group of Native American languages?

In 1927 the National Pecan Growers Association declared the official pronunciation to be as though spelled pea-con.

What nearly wiped out the roughly four billion American chestnut trees in the early 1900s?

The fungus was found on Asian chestnuts planted on Long Island and made public in 1904. Within 40 years the population was devastated.

Chestnut bread never caught on as true bread because chestnut flour has what drawback?

Chestnuts carried a reputation as food for poor people; one 1841 critic called chestnut soup a kind of mortar.

Which insect is considered the world's worst pest of chestnuts?

Dryocosmus kuriphilus is native to East Asia but invasive elsewhere, attacking and destroying the fruit.

Pine nuts are not true nuts because pines belong to which group of plants?

Gymnosperm literally means naked seed; the seed is never enclosed in an ovary that becomes a fruit. Only about 29 pine species yield edible nuts.

Most European pine nuts come from which species, cultivated for over 5,000 years?

In Asia the key commercial species is the Korean pine, while in North America the pinyon pines supply the harvest.

Acorns are the nuts of which group of trees?

Depending on species, an acorn takes anywhere from 5 to 24 months to mature. Nuts like these are collectively called mast.

Which bitter compounds in acorns can cause kidney failure in cattle that eat too many?

Jays and squirrels that cache acorns may wait until groundwater has leached the bitterness out before eating them.

Acorns can make up what share of a deer's diet in autumn?

In Spain, Portugal and England's New Forest, pigs are still turned loose in oak groves each autumn to fatten on the crop.

The name coconut comes from a 16th-century Portuguese word meaning what?

The three indentations on the shell looked like a face. Marco Polo had earlier called it nux indica, the Indian nut.

Genetic studies place the coconut's centre of origin in which region?

Austronesian sailors carried it as far west as Madagascar and as far east as the Pacific Islands, using it for food, water and boat materials.

Dried coconut flesh, pressed for oil and milk, is known by what name?

The fibrous husk yields coir, the hard shell becomes charcoal, and the sweet sap can be fermented into palm wine or vinegar.

Nutella is produced by which Italian company?

The first jar left the factory in Alba on 20 April 1964, and the spread was sold in America for the first time in 1983.

A proposed 2012 French tax nicknamed the Nutella tax targeted which ingredient?

Senator Yves Daudigny wanted the levy raised from 100 to 400 euros per tonne. That same year the maker settled a US health-claims lawsuit for 3 million dollars.

Which of these counts as a tree nut in the allergy sense?

Raw nuts usually provoke stronger reactions than roasted ones, because processing can break down the allergenic storage proteins.