EVERY GREEN FRUIT EXPLAINED transcript

Green is the color of unripe, of not yet, of put that down, it's not ready. That's what we've been taught our entire lives, and almost all of it is wrong. One of the fruits on this list was at the center of a mutiny that changed maritime law forever. One of them was literally banned from being grown in the United States for nearly a hundred years, and the reason is darker than you'd expect. One of them has a sap that will chemically burn your skin, and it's sitting in grocery stores right now with no warning label.

And one of them, the last one, has a smell so overwhelming that scientists actually had to create a category for it. 15 green fruits. Most of them you've seen. A few of them you've eaten your entire life without knowing what you were actually eating. Stay with me through number nine and number 14. Those two are the ones I keep thinking about after making this. And if you've never been here before, we do this for every ingredient worth knowing.

Every fruit, every cut of meat, everything in your kitchen that has a story nobody told you. Hit subscribe. You'll want to be here for the next one. Let's go. One. Avocado. You've probably eaten an avocado this week. Maybe this morning. Here's what nobody told you about it. The avocado is by every definition a fruit that should not exist anymore. Not in the form you know it. The avocado evolved its giant seed for one reason. to be swallowed whole by a massive animal, passed through its digestive system, and deposited somewhere far away from the parent tree.

That's how the seeds spread. That's why avocado seeds are so enormous relative to the fruit. They weren't designed for human hands. They were designed for the gut of a giant ground sloth, an animal the size of an elephant that went extinct roughly 10,000 years [clears throat] ago. The other animals that ate avocados and spread their seeds, mammoths, giant tortoises, prehistoric horses, all gone. same era, same extinction, which means the avocado lost every single creature that was supposed to carry its seeds.

By every ecological rule, that should have been the end of the avocado. Without something to eat it and move the seeds, the tree just drops its fruit underneath itself. The seeds pile up and eventually the species dies out. It happened to dozens of other plants in the Americas when the megapa disappeared. The only reason avocados survived is that humans, specifically early Mesoamerican civilizations, started eating them and planting the seeds on purpose.

We stepped in where the giant sloths left off. Avocados exist today because ancient humans in Mexico became the ecological replacement for a 10,000lb animal. And it gets stranger from there. The avocados you buy at the grocery store are almost all a single variety, the H. And every single H avocado tree on the planet is genetically identical. everyone. They're all clones of a single tree that grew in Rudolph Hass's backyard in La Habra Heights, California in the 1920s.

He was a male carrier. He bought a seedling, planted it, and when it produced fruit, a local grower told him the avocado was so good he should patent it. He did. Patent number 139, first plant patent ever issued for an avocado. That one tree in a male carrier's backyard is the ancestor of every hos avocado that has ever been eaten. every guacamole, every toast, everything. The original hash tree died in 2002, but its offspring are on every grocery shelf in America.

And here's the practical thing you actually need to know. The avocado at the store is never ready to eat the day you buy it. It's harvested hard and ripens off the tree. If you want to slow that down, put it in the fridge. If you want to speed it up, put it in a paper bag with a banana. The banana releases ethylene gas. It will ripen your avocado in a day or two. The giant sloth would have figured that out too eventually.

The next one started as a mistake and became one of the most valuable agricultural accidents in American history. Two. Green apple. Granny Smith. Most people assume the Granny Smith apple was bred in a laboratory. Carefully developed, selected for tartness and that vivid green color. It was found in a compost pile. In 1868, a woman named Maria Anne Smith, who everyone called Granny Smith, was living on a small farm outside Sydney, Australia.

She had been cooking with some French crab apples, threw the cores and peels into her compost, and a seedling sprouted. She didn't plant it. She didn't cultivate it. A tree just grew out of her kitchen scraps. That tree produced apples unlike anything anyone had seen. bright green, extremely tart, incredibly firm, and critically they lasted. While most apple varieties of that era bruised easily and rotted within weeks, Granny Smith apples could be stored for months without losing quality.

They could survive the long shipping routes from Australia to England. That wasn't a minor feature. In an era before refrigeration, it was an agricultural superpower. She died in 1870, 2 years after finding the tree. She never knew what she had started. The apple that carries her name now accounts for roughly 15% of all apples grown in the United States. It's the world's most recognized green apple and it exists entirely because a woman in Australia threw her cooking scraps outside.

Here's what most people don't know about tart apples in general. The tartness comes from malic acid and malic acid does something interesting when you pair it with fat. It cuts through the richness. That's why a sharp green apple works with cheese, with pork, with creambased dishes in a way that sweeter apples don't. It's not just a preference thing. The acid is doing actual chemical work on your pallet. The thing is, almost nobody eats Granny Smith apples raw by choice anymore.

The majority of production goes into pies, sauces, and juices, specifically because that tartness survives cooking in a way that sweeter varieties don't. A honey crisp disappears into mush. A Granny Smith holds its shape and holds its flavor. One more thing, Granny Smith apples are the only major apple variety to have been certified as originating in Australia. Every other common apple you buy, Fuji, Gala, Honey Crisp, Pink Lady, was developed in North America, Europe, or New Zealand.

The Australians have one and it came from a compost pile. Coming up, a fruit that was used as currency in a medieval empire you've definitely heard of and one that America quietly banned for nearly a century. Three, honeydew melon. It looks like the boring option at every hotel breakfast buffet. The one people take because the good fruit is gone. But the honeydew has a past that doesn't match its reputation. The fruit originated in the fertile crescent, the region covering modern-day Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and was eaten in ancient Persia and Egypt as a luxury food.

When archaeologists excavated Egyptian tombs from 2400 BC, they found melon seeds. Melons were placed in tombs as offerings for the afterlife. In a culture that took the afterlife more seriously than almost anything else, what you packed for that journey mattered. They packed honeydew. The Romans moved it westward. And during the medieval period, melons became one of the more valued trade goods across the Arab world.

There are records of melons from the region of MV in modern-day Turk Manistan being packed in leadline boxes with ice and transported hundreds of miles to the caiff in Baghdad as a gift. Just the melon in a special box with its own ice transport. It arrived in France in the late 1400s, possibly brought back by Charles the Fizz after his Italian campaign. The French went so enthusiastic about it that melon consumption became a minor medical concern.

Doctors of the era warned that eating too much cold melon in summer was dangerous. They were wrong about the danger, but the concern says a lot about how seriously the fruit was taken. Here's the thing most people don't know about honeydew. The name honeydew is a marketing invention. The actual variety is called white antibs in France where it was cultivated for centuries. When it arrived in American markets in the early 20th century, importers renamed it white antibs doesn't sell.

Honeydew does. Also, and this is worth knowing, a honeydew that smells like nothing at the grocery store is not ready to eat. A ripe honeydew has a distinct, light, sweet fragrance at the stem end. If you can't smell anything, leave it on your counter for another 2 days. Most Americans eat honeydew about 4 days too early and then decide they don't like it. They've never actually tasted a ready one. Four. Lime. Here is something that will change how you think about every lime you've ever used.

There is no such thing as a naturally occurring Persian lime. The lime in every grocery store in America. The standard lime. The one in every cocktail, on every taco, squeezed into every glass of water at a Mexican restaurant is called a Persian lime. It's the dominant commercial lime on Earth. and it doesn't exist in nature. It's a hybrid. Specifically, it's a cross between a key lime and a citron. And it's seedless because it's a triploid.

Three sets of chromosomes instead of two, which makes it reproductively sterile. It cannot produce seeds. It cannot reproduce on its own. Every Persian lime tree on Earth exists because humans propagated it through cutings. You've been eating a fruit that cannot reproduce by itself your entire life, and probably nobody mentioned it. The key lime, the small yellowted, intensely fragrant one, is actually closer to what most of the world considers a lime.

It's native to Southeast Asia, moved westward through Persia and the Arab world, arrived in the Americas with Spanish explorers, and became so established in Florida by the late 1800s that Key West built an entire culinary identity around it. Then a hurricane hit in 1926 and wiped out virtually all the key lime groves in Florida. Farmers replanted with Persian limes because they were easier to grow, had a longer shelf life, and were easier to ship.

Within a generation, the Persian lime had replaced the key lime so completely in American markets that most people forgot key limes had ever been the standard. Key lime pie was originally made with actual key limes. The version you get in most restaurants today uses Persian lime juice, sometimes bottled, and the result is significantly less complex and less fragrant. If you've never had key lime pie made with actual fresh key limes, you've had a version of the dish, not the dish.

Here's what the lime trade doesn't talk about. Limes are picked green before they're ripe. A fully ripe lime is yellow. The green color you associate with freshness and flavor is actually the color of an unripe fruit. Grocery stores sell them green because they survive shipping better in that state. By the time you cut open a lime at home, it's still technically not fully ripe. The flavor difference between a green lime and a yellow lime is significant. more aromatic, more complex, less sharp.

If you ever see yellow limes at a farmers market or a Latin grocery, try them. It's a different experience, and we're not even halfway through. The next one has a name that's a lie. And the lie made someone a fortune. Five. Kiwi fruit. If you're watching this from China, you might recognize the kiwi by a very different name. The fruit that the rest of the world calls a kiwi is called Chinese gooseberry in its native region.

It's been growing wild in the Yangze River Valley for thousands of years. It's not from New Zealand. It wasn't discovered in New Zealand. It was grown, cultivated, and eaten in China long before anyone in New Zealand knew it existed. New Zealand got seeds from China in 1904, planted them, and started growing the fruit commercially in the 1930s. And then Cold War politics created a problem that nobody had anticipated.

In the 1950s, American consumers weren't exactly rushing to buy something called a Chinese gooseberry. Relations between the US between the US and China were as tense as they'd ever been. The name alone was enough to kill sales. So, the New Zealand growers made a decision. They renamed it. They called it the Kiwi fruit after the kiwi bird, their national symbol, and relaunched it for American markets. Exports to the United States took off almost immediately.

Within two decades, the kiwi had gone from an almost unknown Asian fruit to a grocery store staple across North America. The kiwi bird and the kiwi fruit have absolutely nothing to do with each other beyond sharing a name that a marketing team chose in the 1950s. The bird doesn't eat the fruit. The fruit doesn't grow near the bird's habitat. The connection is entirely commercial. Here's the part that gets stranger. The fuzzy green kiwi most Americans know and the golden kiwi sold right next to it on the same shelf are not the same fruit.

They're not ripeness stages. They're not color variations of the same variety. They are genetically distinct cultivars with meaningfully different flavor profiles. The gold one is sweeter, softer, less tart, and has thinner skin that many people eat without peeling. Most Americans have only ever tried the green one, which is the more aggressive, more acidic of the two. And here's the enzyatic fact. Kiwi fruit contains a protein dissolving enzyme called actinidin.

It's similar to the bromelain in pineapple. If you put fresh kiwi in Jell-O, the Jell-O will never set. The enzyme breaks down the gelatin proteins before they can solidify. This is also why kiwi is an effective meat tenderizer. Slice one and press it against a tough cut for 20 minutes, and the enzyme will begin breaking down the muscle fibers. A fruit that serves as both a dessert and a tenderizer. Real quick, if you've learned something in the last few minutes that you didn't know before, that's what this channel is every week.

Hit subscribe and you won't miss the next one. Now, let's keep going. Six. Green mango. The mango most Americans know is ripe, orange, and sweet. That's the only version most of the country has ever encountered. In South and Southeast Asia, the green mango, unripe, dense, sour, and crunchy, is not a lesser version of the fruit. It's a completely separate ingredient with its own culinary identity. Green mango is to ripe mango what green tomato is to red tomato.

Same plant, completely different food. In Thailand, green mango is shredded into sam, a salad so popular it's considered a national dish with fish sauce, lime, chili, and peanuts. In India, it's dried and ground into amchure powder, which is used as a souring agent the way Americans use lemon juice. In the Philippines, it's eaten fresh with salt and shrimp paste. In Vietnam, it's sliced and served with a dipping sauce made from chili and salt and is sold by street vendors as a snack, the way American vendors sell pretzels.

Here's the part that puts green mango in a different category entirely. In traditional Ayurvedic medicine, the ancient Indian medical system that's been practiced for over 3,000 years. Green mango was used as a treatment for heat exhaustion. The logic was that the high levels of tartaric and malic acid in unripe mango help the body maintain its alkaline reserves during extreme heat. Is that medically proven by modern standards?

Not conclusively. But here's what is documented. Raw, unripe mango has significantly higher concentrations of certain compounds, including vitamin C, the ripe fruit. The ripening process actually reduces some of the nutritional potency. The green version has a legitimate claim to being the more nutrient-dense option. What most Americans don't know is that green mangoes are available in Asian and Latin grocery stores year round, usually at a fraction of the cost of ripe ones.

If you've never eaten green mango with chili and salt, you've had half the experience of a fruit you think you already know. Here's the next one. I promise you haven't heard this before. Seven. Chiote. Most people walk right past this one at the grocery store because they genuinely have no idea what they're looking at. The chiote looks like a pear had an argument with a lime and lost. It's pale green, slightly wrinkled, pear-shaped, and sits quietly in the produce section, looking like it belongs to a different vegetable aisle.

Most Americans have no framework for it. Here's the thing that stops people when they hear it. The hyote is one of the only plants in the world that can reproduce from its own fruit without extracting the seed. You take a whole kyote, you put it in some soil, literally the whole fruit, uncut. The single seed inside is fused to the flesh. You can't remove it without destroying the seed. So, you just plant the entire fruit and it grows.

A new vine sprouts directly from the coyote itself. This is unusual enough in the plant kingdom that botonists have a specific name for it, vivipery. When a seed germinates while still inside the parent fruit, chiote does this so readily that if you leave one on your counter long enough, it will begin sprouting without any soil at all. The Aztecs and Maya cultivated chiote extensively before Spanish contact. It was one of their staple crops.

The entire plant was used, the vine, the root, the young leaves, and the fruit. Spanish explorers encountered it in the 1500s and brought it back to Europe where it spread to Africa, Asia, and the rest of the Americas. In Louisiana, it's called Miratin, and it's been a Cajun staple since the 1800s. Stuffed with shrimp and crab meat and baked. In Mexico, it's eaten raw in salads, cooked in stews, or pickled. In Brazil, it's called chuchu and shows up in everything from soups to side dishes.

The flavor raw is crisp and mild, somewhere between hikima and cucumber with almost no sweetness. Cooked, it absorbs whatever it's cooked with completely, which makes it one of the most adaptable vegetables in any kitchen. It has no strong opinions of its own. It becomes whatever you cook it with. It's also extremely cheap. If you've never tried it, there's no reason not to. It's probably at a Latin grocery store near you for under a dollar.

And now we get to the one that was actually illegal. Eight. Gooseberry. For most of the 20th century, it was illegal to grow gooseberries in the United States. Not restricted, not regulated, banned, federally banned. In many states, you could be fined for having a gooseberry bush on your property. The reason involves one of the most catastrophic plant diseases in American history. At the turn of the 20th century, white pine blister rust, a fungal disease that had arrived from Europe, began destroying white pine trees across the Northeast.

White pine was the most valuable timber tree in North America. The logging industry depended on it, and blister rust was killing millions of trees. Scientists traced the disease's life cycle and discovered something troubling. Blister rust couldn't spread directly from pine to pine. It needed an intermediate host. It had to pass through a specific type of plant before it could reinfect trees. That intermediate host was the currant and gooseberry family.

In 1911, the federal government began banning the cultivation of gooseberries and currants across the country to break the disease cycle and save the pine industry. The ban was enforced seriously enough that state agriculture departments sent inspectors to destroy plants on private property. Tens of thousands of gooseberry bushes were pulled out across New England, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. The federal ban was officially lifted in 1966, but individual states maintained their own bans for decades afterward.

Massachusetts didn't lift its restrictions until 2003. The state of New York maintained a partial ban until 2003 as well, which means there are Americans alive today who grew up in a world where gooseberries were illegal and have never actually eaten one. Here's what makes this genuinely regrettable. The gooseberry is exceptional fruit. It's tart and sweet simultaneously with a firmness that holds up in cooking and a flavor that some people compare to a cross between a grape and a tart apple with a slight floral quality.

In England, where no such ban ever existed, the gooseberry has been cultivated and celebrated since at least the 1500s. Gooseberry fool, whipped cream folded into sweetened gooseberry puree, is considered one of the definitive British desserts. In the United States, the goose berry is still far less common than it should be. Partly because two generations of American farmers never grew them and partly because they don't ship well.

You'll find them occasionally at farmers markets in Midsummer. If you do, buy them. They don't come around often. If you're the kind of person who needs to know why things are the way they are, and you're still here, so you probably are. Subscribe. We go this deep on every ingredient. New video every week. Nine. Green fig. The fig is technically not a fruit in the conventional sense. It's an inverted flower. What you're eating when you eat a fig is actually a structure called a syonium, a fleshy pod that has folded inward, trapping dozens of tiny flowers inside.

The seeds you feel when you eat a fig are actually tiny fruits. Each one produced by one of those internal flowers. The fig itself is a container for fruit, not fruit in the direct sense. You're eating a cluster of very small fruits inside an edible bag. This matters because of what it means for pollination. In nature, the flowers inside a fig can only be pollinated by a specific type of wasp, the fig wasp. Small enough to crawl inside through a tiny opening at the base.

Different fig species have their own specific wasp species. The relationship is so exclusive that if the wasp goes extinct, the fig species it pollinates goes extinct, too. And vice versa. They are locked in a co-evolutionary partnership that goes back 34 million years. Here's the part people find alarming when they first hear it. In naturally pollinated figs, the female wasp enters the fig to lay her eggs, pollinates the flowers in the process, and then dies inside.

The fig produces enzymes that break down the wasp's body completely. When you eat a naturally pollinated fig, you are eating digested wasp. The commercially grown figs you buy in the United States, specifically the mission fig and most supermarket varieties are produced from a variety called a common fig that doesn't require wasp pollination. They're self-fertile. No wasps involved. But here's the other thing about figs that almost nobody knows.

The milky white sap that comes from a fresh cut fig stem or from the leaves or from unripe figs. That sap is a skin irritant. Contact dermatitis. It contains compounds called furokoumerins that react with UV light and can cause blistering and chemical burns on exposed skin, particularly in sunlight. It's the same family of compounds found in wild parsnip and giant hogweed, which have caused serious injuries. Fig farmers know this and wear gloves.

Most consumers don't know it exists. If you're handling fresh figs straight from a tree and you notice a rash afterward, that's why. 10. Sour sap. This one has become one of the most controversial fruits in American markets. The sour sap, also called graviola, is a large dark green spiny fruit native to the tropical Americas. The flesh inside is white and creamy with a complex flavor that people describe as a cross between strawberry, pineapple, and coconut with a custard-like texture.

It's genuinely good. In the Caribbean and Latin America, sour sop juice and ice cream are stapled. And then the internet got hold of it. Starting in the late 2000s, claims began circulating online that sour was a cancer cure. The claims were specific that compounds in sour called anonyin and related acidogenins had demonstrated anti-tumor activity. Some websites stated that sour sop was 10,000 times more effective than chemotherapy.

The claims went viral on health blogs in supplement marketing and across social media. Sour pills, sour powders, sour teas flooded the supplement market. The actual scientific picture is significantly more complicated. It's true that sour compounds have shown anti-cancer activity in laboratory settings, in cell cultures, and animal studies. That part is real. What hasn't been demonstrated is that those compounds work the same way in a living human body at doses you'd get from eating the fruit or taking a supplement.

Here's the part that matters and that very few of the health websites mention. The same anonosin compounds that have shown potential anti-tumor effects in lab studies are also neurotoxic. They've been linked to an atypical form of Parkinson's disease in populations in the Caribbean and Pacific islands where sour sop consumption is very high. The connection between regular highdosese sour consumption and neurological damage is documented in peer-reviewed literature.

The FDA has not approved sour as a cancer treatment. It's sold freely as a food and supplement. The marketing often implies medical benefits that the science hasn't established and quietly ignores a documented risk. Eat it as a fruit. It's delicious. Take it as a cancer treatment in place of actual medical care. That's a different conversation and it's one worth having with a doctor. Up next, a fruit so fragrant that the scientists who first studied it couldn't agree on how to describe it.

And after that, the one that caused a mutiny. 11. FJOA. There is a fruit that most Americans have never seen, can't pronounce correctly, and would probably never pick up at a store, and it has one of the most remarkable aromomas of anything that grows on a tree. The fajjoa, pronounced fajjoa, it's a small oval fruit about the size of a large egg with green skin that looks almost exactly like a guava's exterior. It's native to the highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and northern Argentina.

It's the national fruit of New Zealand, which grows a significant commercial crop. In parts of the former Soviet Union, particularly Azerbaijan, and Georgia, it's been grown for over a century and is considered an everyday fruit, the way apples are everyday here. The smell is the thing. When a fajjo is ripe, it produces an aroma that combines notes of pineapple, guava, eucalyptus, and mint. In a combination that doesn't exist in any other food, it's so distinctive that perfumemers have studied it as a potential fragrance ingredient.

The flavor inside follows the scent, sweet, tropical, with a slightly grainy texture near the skin and a smoother, more intensely flavored center. The problem is shelf life. A ripe fajjoa is extremely delicate. Once it reaches peak ripeness, it deteriorates within a few days. That makes large-scale commercial distribution in the United States essentially unworkable. You can't get them to the consumer in time. Which means the only reliable way to experience a foa in America is either at a specialty farmers market through a small number of online importers or if you're lucky enough to know someone with a tree.

They're grown as ornamentals in parts of California, and homeowners who don't know what they have will let the fruit fall and rot. If you ever encounter one, eat it the same day. Cut it in half and scoop the flesh with a spoon. The skin is edible, but bitter. The inside is the whole point. Most Americans will live their entire lives without ever tasting this fruit. That seems worth correcting. 12. Green tomato. This is the one that will probably start an argument at your dinner table.

The green tomato is simultaneously a fruit and legally a vegetable. And the US and the US Supreme Court actually had to weigh in on this. Here's the background. In 1893, a case called Nyx vheden went all the way to the Supreme Court. At the time, vegetables were subject to an import tariff that fruits were not. A tomato importer sued arguing that because the tomato is botanically a fruit, it develops from the flour and contains seeds.

It should be classified as a fruit and be exempt from the tariff. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tomato was a vegetable, not because of biology, because of common usage. The court's reasoning was that in everyday American life, the tomato was used as a vegetable in salads, in savory dishes rather than as a dessert fruit. So legally, commercially, and for tariff purposes, it was a vegetable. The biological fact didn't change.

A tomato is still a fruit by every scientific definition, but in the eyes of American law, it's a vegetable. And the green tomato specifically adds another layer. An unripe green tomato contains significantly higher levels of tomatine, a naturally occurring compound in the nightshade family that can cause gastrointestinal issues in large amounts. Not toxic at the quantities in a serving or two, but not negligible either.

Fried green tomatoes, the southern staple, are made from green tomatoes precisely because the firmness holds up to frying in a way that ripe tomatoes don't. The dish works because of the unripe state, not despite it. Here's the thing about the American South and Green Tomatoes. The popularity of the dish isn't that old. The novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe was published in 1987. The movie came out in 1991.

After that, fried green tomatoes became a menu item at restaurants across the South that had never served them before. A regional dish that existed mostly in home kitchens, became a cultural icon in about 5 years. The green tomato was turned into a defining symbol of southern cuisine by a novel and a movie. That's not a criticism. That's just how food culture actually works. And now the last one. The one that caused a mutiny.

The one that changed the law. 13. Bread fruit from Meech. Here is something that should be impossible. A fruit that tastes like bread that you can bake, fry, boil, or roast. That has roughly the same starch content as a potato, but grows on a tropical tree. That a single tree of it can produce enough food to feed a family of four for an entire year with almost no maintenance. And that the attempt to transport this fruit across the Atlantic Ocean in 1789 triggered one of the most famous mutinies in naval history.

The bread fruit. It's large, sometimes the size of a basketball with a green dimpled exterior and a starchy white interior that when cooked actually has a bread-like texture and a mild, slightly sweet flavor. It's been a staple crop in Polynesia and the Pacific Islands for thousands of years. Islanders relied on it as a primary calorie source, the same way people in other parts of the world relied on rice or wheat. In the late 1700s, British plantation owners in the Caribbean faced a problem.

They needed to feed enslaved workers cheaply and reliably. Someone proposed breadf fruit. It grew fast. It was calorie dense and it cost almost nothing to maintain. They petitioned King George III who commissioned an expedition. The ship sent to collect bread plants from Tahiti was the HMS bounty. The captain was William Bllye. The crew spent 5 months in Tahiti waiting for the bread fruitfruit plants to be ready for transport.

That delay, combined with BL's disciplinary style and the comfort of Tahesian life, created conditions that, when the ship departed with over a thousand breadfruit plants, were already unstable. 23 days into the return voyage, Fletcher Christian led a mutiny. Bllye and 18 loyal crew members were put into an open boat with minimal supplies. They survived. Bllye navigated 3600 m to safety in what became one of the greatest openwater voyages in history.

The bread fruit never reached the Caribbean on that voyage. The mutineers threw most of the plants overboard. A second expedition successfully delivered bread fruit to the Caribbean in 1793. The enslaved workers it was meant to feed, largely refused to eat it. They didn't recognize the food and didn't trust it. The grand plan never achieved what the plantation owners intended. Today, bread fruit is experiencing a quiet agricultural revival.

It can be grown in tropical regions around the world, produces enormous yields with minimal inputs, and has a nutritional profile that compares favorably to most starchy staples. There are agricultural organizations actively working to introduce it in food insecure regions across Africa and the Caribbean. A fruit that caused a mutiny that was rejected by the people it was supposed to feed that is now being proposed as a solution to global food insecurity.

The history of food is never simple. 14. Green papaya. You've probably eaten green papaya without knowing it. If you've ever been to a Thai restaurant and ordered a salad, the crunchy, tart, spicy one that comes out before everything else, that's green papaya, shredded raw, completely unripe. Nothing like the soft orange, sweet papaya you buy at the grocery store. Green papaya and ripe papaya are the same fruit at different stages, but they're used so differently in Asian cuisine that they function as entirely separate ingredients.

Ripe papaya is a breakfast fruit or a dessert element, soft, sweet, tropical. Green papaya is a vegetable, crunchy, neutral, slightly tanic, and used as a carrier for the intense flavors it's dressed with. Here's the enzyme story. Papaya, both green and ripe, contains an enzyme called papign. It's a protein dissolving enzyme, powerful enough that it's been extracted commercially and used as the active ingredient in meat tenderizers.

Adolf's meat tenderizer, which has been on American grocery shelves since 1947, is essentially pepign in a shaker. You've probably used it without knowing it came from papaya. Pain is also used in contact lens cleaning solutions to break down protein deposits. And in some countries, it's used in wound care treatments because of its ability to break down dead tissue without damaging healthy tissue. The same enzyme that makes meat tender is cleaning contact lenses and healing wounds.

Here's the practical thing. Green papaya is available at virtually any Asian grocery store for a fraction of the cost of ripe papaya. If you want to try making a simple version of Thai papaya salad at home, shredded green papaya, lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, chili, crushed peanuts. It's one of the simpler dishes you can make and one of the most refreshing things you can eat in hot weather. But I've been saving the last one, the one I mentioned at the very beginning, and it's the strangest entry on this list. 15.

Osage orange. This is the one. There is a fruit the size of a grapefruit, bright green, covered in a wrinkled brain-like surface that falls from trees across the American Midwest every autumn in enormous quantities. You've probably seen it on the ground. You've probably kicked one. You might have wondered vaguely what it was. You have almost certainly never eaten one. The Osage orange, also called hedge apple, horse apple, or monkey ball, is technically edible in very small amounts, but no one eats it.

It's not poisonous in the way that would send you to a hospital, but the flavor is described universally as terrible, bitter, chemical, deeply unpleasant. The flesh is full of a milky latex-l like sap that coats your mouth. And yet, this fruit is fascinating in a way that has nothing to do with eating. The Osage orange tree was one of the most strategically important trees in American westward expansion. Before barbed wire was invented in 1874, farmers in the treeless prairies of the Midwest had nothing to fence their land with.

They planted oage orange trees in dense rows. Trimmed them into hedge rows and the thorny fast growing trees formed living fences that were, as the saying of the era went, horse high, bullstrong, and hogtight. The hedges held livestock as effectively as any wooden fence and didn't rot. When barbed wire arrived and replaced the hedge, tens of millions of Osage orange trees were left standing. They're still there. They drop their fruit every October and nobody picks it up.

Here's the thing that scientists discovered more recently. The Osage orange is another fruit that evolved for a megapona that no longer exists. Its giant, heavy, nutrient-dense fruit, which no modern North American animal eats in any significant quantity, appears to have co-evolved with mastadons and giant ground sloths. The same extinct animals that were supposed to be spreading avocado seeds. They ate oage oranges, too.

When the megapona went extinct, the Osage orange lost its seed dispers. The fruit just falls under the tree and rots. That's why you see them piled up under certain trees in the fall with nothing touching them. A fruit that evolved for an animal that hasn't existed for 10,000 years that was repurposed to build fences across an entire continent that now falls to the ground every autumn while people walk past it, kick it, and have no idea what they're looking at.

The most interesting thing in this video might be the thing you've been walking past your whole life without knowing its name. 15 green fruits. One of them is a legal vegetable. One of them caused a mutiny. One of them is a 34 million-year-old partnership with a wasp. One of them was federally banned and one of them evolved for an animal that disappeared before written history began. Green is supposed to mean not ready yet.

Every fruit on this list was more than ready. We just weren't paying attention. Drop a comment right now and tell me which one genuinely surprised you and which one have you actually tried. I read every single one and someone always comments at 2:00 in the morning from somewhere completely unexpected. That's the best part of making these. If you haven't subscribed yet, do it now. You've already seen what we do here. The next one is just as deep.

See you there.