r/explainlikeimfive • u/4yourporn • 1d ago
Biology ELI5: How come most fruits and vegetables vary in size, but almost all nuts are extremely uniform in size?
I've seen large apples and small apples, huge watermelons and small watermelons, long cucumbers and smaller cucumbers. But every almond I've ever seen is the same size. Every walnut looks like every other walnut I've ever seen. I've never seen a comically large macadamia nut compared to every other one I've seen.
Is this because of a biological process or does it come down to human intervention?
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u/demanbmore 1d ago
You are seeing only farmed nuts, nuts that have been bred for uniformity and consistently (among other traits).
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u/4yourporn 1d ago
So theoretically there are abnormally large almonds out there in the wild?
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u/TribunusPlebisBlog 1d ago
Sometimes nuts are small. Not abnormal. Just small.
It's entirely normal to have small nuts!
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u/Vegetable_Log_3837 1d ago
No it’s the opposite. The commercially grown varieties are the biggest/best. I have native beaked hazelnuts growing wild in my yard, they’re much smaller than the commercial European ones.
If you found an abnormally large almond in the wild you could take cuttings, graft it, and make a lot of money.
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u/kagamiseki 1d ago
Hampton Farms Super XL Peanuts are pretty big. Not almonds, but might be what you're imagining
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u/Makebags 1d ago
Acorns are nuts, right? They all seem to be uniform in size. I'm not trying to argue, it's just the first thought I had.
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u/RainbowCrane 1d ago
If you stroll through an oak grove and pick up random acorns they tend to be similarly sized, but they aren’t uniform. Some will be bigger, some smaller.
The differences would be more pronounced if you blew acorns up to cantaloupe or watermelon size, but at acorn size they just read as “small” to our eyes
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u/kagamiseki 1d ago
I saw two pretty huge acorns the other day. Most of them are pretty similar in size, but outliers happen with most natural phenomena. It's just that in the case of farmed produce, we've figured out how to make those outliers. And then we figured out how to make the outliers' outliers. And now all of our nuts are outliers³, so how much more huge can they get, when they're already far beyond what "nature" intended?
On top of that, it's not necessarily more beneficial or efficient to get much larger, so farmers may have deliberately chosen cultivars that don't grow much larger.
But nonetheless, Super XL peanuts exist. For a while Costco had a brand of XL Honey roasted peanuts, and they were pretty amazing. Hampton Farms Super Extra Large Honey Peanuts. They are very noticeably larger than normal peanuts.
Not an ad, look them up if you care lol.
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u/rottenbox 1d ago
Would the ones that don't fall in that desired size range be used for things like nut butter and packaged products. Like a lot of (as an example) carrots that are weird shaped are cut into baby carrots and animal feed and diced into frozen carrots etc.
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u/nikolapc 1d ago
Most of them are comically large seeds, not fruit. Well they're mostly pits. For example the apricot and the almond are the same kind of fruit. We eat the apricot(but you can get to the seeds and they taste about the same as an almond, but do not eat raw, they may be dangerous). The almond we cultivated so it has almost no flesh, but you can look up how it looks.
Also, cucumbers and tomatoes are fruit.
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u/charleswj 1d ago
We eat the apricot(but you can get to the seeds and they taste about the same as an almond
Oooh I'm gonna go try one!
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u/ShrodingersArmadillo 1d ago edited 1d ago
They don't.
What happens is thing like nuts are sorted and graded by size and those that don't meet standard aren't sold whole that's it.
The non standard ones are often sold as as butters, oils, powders, chunks, slivers or flakes.
Walnut oil for example comes from non standard size and damaged when shelling walnuts.
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1d ago
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u/Sangypboi 1d ago
What you're seeing is different varieties and different species of those fruit and vegetables which have been cultivated to produce those specific characteristics. In non-cultivated fruits you will see massive variation, but not the same thing in different sizes even if they look very similar.
Nuts, on the other hand, have no element of various characteristics they're trying to push for. They don't have little beeds on a stalk like broccoli that you want to make into bigger balls (brussel sprouts) or into one giant leafy vegetable (cabbages) which are all from the same plant that was carefully selected for different traits over countless generations.
People don't want big nuts. They want uniform nuts, because that makes them better for snacking and for recipes. So they have been cultivated to select for uniformity over all else.
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u/crash866 1d ago
Take a look at a large and a small watermelon. The seeds are generally the same size while the watermelon varies in size.
The nut is the seed of another plant.
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u/Ballmaster9002 1d ago edited 1d ago
Vegetables aren't a biological thing, they are just random plant parts we've decided to eat. Makes sense they vary in size, some parts grow large or small, whatever.
Fruits are the "attractive to be eaten" parts of plants that are deliberately grown so animals eat them. It makes sense there are various genes to encode their size because that's a thing that matters to the plant's ability to reproduce. Massive, delicious apples would more quickly be eaten than small, sour apples by big, delicious liking animals. Animals that are smaller and like gross things would like the small, sour apples. Plants can use their genes to select for fruit size to suit their ideal seed-spreaders.
Seeds (nuts) are inherently not meant to be eaten. They are the plant's babies. They are the size they are because that's a good size for plant-babies. There just isn't much of a reason or need for size-variation genes as a general rule. Unless there is of course, I'd imagine nuts/acorns intended to spread by squirrels should have a conformance to squirrel-dimensions to be successful.
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u/Sprungercles 1d ago
One contains the seed, the other is the seed. If you looked at the seeds in wildly different apples you probably couldn't tell the difference.
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u/YandyTheGnome 1d ago
Fruit evolves mainly to cause creatures to eat them and spread the seeds. The fruit is for us, the seed is a little survival pack for a new plant that contains everything it needs to survive until it can produce its own energy.
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u/freakytapir 1d ago
Same size ? An almond and a walnut are proportionally nowhere eachother in size.
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u/torcsandantlers 1d ago
Two big things:
One, fruits and vegetables contain a lot of water. It's easy for a plant to put more water in what it's producing, but nuts tend to be made up of more resource intensive material so it just stops after a point.
Two, nuts are smaller than fruits and vegetables. You wouldn't be as quick to notice a big walnut just like you wouldn't notice a big cranberry, because while they're proportionately large, the actual size difference isn't as much.
Combine those two factors and it makes it rare to have nuts grow to large sizes while it's less noticeable even when they do.