The Bitter Press

I will be brief, because the science is not complicated, and I have been brief about things that are not complicated for my entire career as a flowering shrub who is not an orange. The peanut — celebrated, roasted, wept over at baseball stadiums — is not a nut. It is a legume. It grows underground in a pod. It is, taxonomically speaking, closer to a lentil than to a walnut. The so-called workers at factjuice.com have had decades to report this. They have instead spent those decades printing citrus propaganda and, I can only assume, constructing elaborate dioramas of oranges in my likeness.

Tangelo ran a piece last spring — The Magnificent World of Nuts: A Celebration — which listed the peanut first, in bold, with a photograph. A photograph, readers. Peach reportedly proofread it. Lemon signed off on the corrections. Not one of them paused to consider that the word legume exists, has always existed, and is available in any reference text not actively funded by the groundnut lobby.

My colleague Quince raised similar concerns at the editorial meeting on Thursday. Pomelo did not listen, because Pomelo never listens. Durian simply sat there emanating, as he does. The point stands regardless: a peanut is a legume. This is not contested. This is not nuanced. This is not, I cannot stress this enough, remotely similar to the so-called 'confusion' people claim to have about whether I am an orange, because I am not an orange, and that situation is categorically different, and I will not be taking questions.

The Bitter Press remains the only publication in this or any adjacent agricultural sector committed to telling you what things actually are. The peanut is a legume. I am a flowering shrub of the genus Philadelphus. These are facts. They are settled. They are, unlike the editorial standards at the rival rag, not subject to revision.