The Romans considered basically all fruits/vegetables to be one of two things: apples or melons. This lasted up until recently: potatoes being pommes de terre (earth apples), tomatoes being pomodoros, etc.

appel of paradis: middle English for banana https://twitter.com/sublimemarch/status/1357722910383816711

Up until the 17th century, it is weirdly hard to understand recipes where damn near anything could be described as an apple.

"Toss in 1lb of apple" could literally mean a citrus fruit, figs, even *walnuts*

Basically: up until very recently, Europeans saw the produce binary as apple or watermelon.

Nowadays you'd think it nutty if someone pointed at an orange and said "apple"

But the Old French word for an orange was pomme d'orenge. An apple of orange.

The ability to easily differentiate apples and oranges is something we take for granted nowadays.

We have advanced to the point where we can look at a fruit salad and identify each thing as something that is not an apple.

We can now write down a recipe for a fruit salad and someone can replicate it without producing a weird result like half a pound of diced potatoes and a big ol pine-apple.

We now are able to generally understand that most fruits are not apples.

Oh hey, guess what μῆλον, melon, means in Greek?

It means apple.

Basically: trying to explain gender to cis people is like going back in time and trying to explain to a european chef that no, a pineapple is not the same as a goddamn butternut squash in this recipe.

Using fruit to explain a binary is *hilarious* when you know that up til recently, oranges were seen as a type of apple.

This was a pomelo, literally an apple-melon (or an apple-apple if you were Greek).

Cis people are not yet able to distinguish apples from oranges, and they think they are qualified to talk about making fruit salad.

Pictured: a deceptive apple.

The word fig comes from the Old English fíc, or fike. It generally meant “ill-meaning, evil-minded, treacherous, hostile, deceptive, bad".

The word "sycophant" comes from the Greek word for fig.

The original bad apple. In latin, that's malus malum.

This is an apricot.

It's short for mālum [praecoq]uum, apple that ripens early.

Did you ever wonder why these are called "peppercorns"?

Because up til recently, corn meant any kind of grain or seed, not just grains of maize.

Corned beef is named for the small seed-sized chunks of salt used to make it. Saltcorns.

Going back to pomodoros.

We know what color the first Italian tomatoes were: not red, but golden.

Pomodoro: pomo d'oro apple of gold.

Similarly, this is what eggplants used to look like before they were specifically bred for a patriotic purple color.

The latin name for it is Solanum melongena, or "crazy apple."

Eggplants used to be egg-shaped crazy apples.

The Polish word for orange: pomarańcza. An orange-colored apple.

This is a pomegranate. A many-seeded apple.

Grenades were *named after* the fruit. They looked like pomegranates, and were full of grains of gunpowder, so it made sense.

What do Italians call pomegranates?

melagrana. Seedy apples.

These are pumpkins, derived from the Greek word for melon "pepon" through the Middde French "pompon" to the early modern english word "pompion".

In Australian English, "pumpkin" refers to *any* winter squash.

To a kiwi or an aussie, these are all pumpkins.

Why did the spelling change from "pompion" to "pumpkin"?

Because the English colonized north america, where they encountered the round and orange winter squashes called "pôhpukun" used by the Wampanoag people.

At some point recently, if you tried to follow a pumpkin pie recipe you'd end up making it with a butternut squash.

"3 pounds of pompion? Nice, I got a bunch of pompion right here in my pantry"

This is a date. In old english, a fingeræppla, a finger-apple.

Why "date"?

Because the latin for finger is "dactylus" and the french turned that into "date" and someone tried to get fancy.

Cucumber: eorþæppla in old english. earth-apple.

Potato: pomme de terre. earth apple.

Just two earth apples, hanging out.

Oh: "meat" also used to refer to food in general. Only recently did it get narrowed down to specifically animal flesh.