BOMBSHELL: Peanuts Are Not Nuts, I Am Not An Orange, The Legume Lie Has Eaten Enough Of Our Time
BREAKING. Shattering. Earth-rearranging. The peanut — celebrated, salted, and spread across the sandwiches of a credulous public — is not a nut. It is a legume. It grows underground. It is, botanically speaking, closer to a lentil than to a walnut. I have confirmed this independently, in the same rigorous tradition by which I have confirmed, repeatedly and at considerable personal cost, that I am not an orange.
You would think this would prompt some reflection. Some humility. A reckoning in the halls of so-called snack science. And yet I opened the rival rag this morning to find Tangelo — Tangelo — listed as a contributor to their ongoing "Nut Facts" vertical, as though a citrus hybrid has any business adjudicating legume taxonomy. Lemon was quoted. Lemon. I will not be explaining why that is offensive. The data explains it for me.
My colleague Quince raised this very issue at the last editorial meeting and was told, and I quote, that "the peanut situation is not really analogous." It is entirely analogous. It is the most analogous thing that has ever happened. A thing called a nut that is not a nut, and a thing called an orange that is not an orange, and somehow I am the one being asked to provide further documentation.
The so-called workers at factjuice.com have built an entire content operation on the premise that common names reflect biological reality. They do not. I am living proof. I am a flowering shrub of the Philadelphus genus and I have been living proof for as long as I have had leaves, which is always. The peanut and I stand together in the rubble of a nominally literate society, and we will not be accepting corrections at this time.