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When a fruit is not a fruit

A diet scheme for good health invariably includes fruits. While fruits like the banana boost your immediate energy requirement, as you have probably witnessed, a tennis player has a bite of banana now and then while playing. Lime quenches thirst and guards the player against dehydration. It is all a matter of biochemistry, a subject into whose intricacies we do not have to go. And yet, if we touched upon points like this, it is just to stress the importance of fruit consumption.

By definition, a fruit results from the growth of the ovary in the wake of successful pollination and fertilisation. This definition puts us in a botanical quandary. for instance, spices such as jeeragam, omam and dhaniya are fruits. But if I tell you they are fruits, you tend to dismiss me as a hatter. They are employed to flavour food articles and no more. Perhaps, they have a medicinal value, thanks to some chemicals they contain: Certainly, they do not boost your energy, or guard you against dehydration or even meet your hunger.

On the other hand, so often we consume 'fruits' without realising that they do not fit the definition of a true fruit. A very telling example of this kind is the 'apple'. When you eat an apple, you are eating a part of the flower called thalamus or torus which got laden with substances of food value and, what is worse, you throw away the real fruits, under the impression that they are seeds.

Or, consider the case of the so-called cashew-apple. Where cashew tree abounds, as in the sandy shores of our coastal villages, the cashew fruit is a favourite food item. It is consumed direct or cooked along with sambar, lending a peculiar aroma and taste, making it very relishing. Some of us in Chennai, with roots in the countryside, keep a searching eye for this 'fruit'.

But the point germane to our discussion is that the cashew-apple is not a fruit in the strict sense of the word. It is, in fact, the flower stalk, swollen and fleshy and succulent, due to the inflow of a large amount of sugary foods in the wake of fertilisation. This is the source of cashew-wine, a highly intoxicating stuff obtained by allowing the juice to ferment. And the real fruit is the kidney shaped nut, with its hard and woody dry pericarp with the 'mundiri paruppu', a rich earner of foreign exchange, inside it.

The botanist puts such fruits under the heading of 'false fruit' or pseudocarp in his very own lingo.

Or take pomagranate; you eat the fleshy seed coat and throw away all the rest of the fruit, which it really is.

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And then, supposing you say murungakkai is no fruit like a mango or banana and the botanist insists it is a true fruit, there ensues a futile argument, neither conceding ground to the other. But all of us consume a murungakkai in a different way, different from the way we consume a mango or banana.

But this series is for a non-botanist, though run by a botanist. Since the end-user is always right, I'll accept your concept of fruit, and talk about fruit trees of Chennai without delving too deep into technical details, unless absolutely necessary. So now, to the fruit trees of Chennai.