My son likes to watch the Wiggles at breakfast. Since it’s pretty much the only TV he gets to watch, I don’t mind. The music is catchy, and sometimes it provides a conversation topic for after the show’s over. Like this morning: The Wiggles were singing about Central Park, New York, where you can say, “G’day squirrels!” Because our builders thought it’d be a really good idea to bulldoze all the trees in our neighborhood, we don’t have many squirrels. So we talked about squirrels. I told Fang that squirrels like to climb trees and they eat nuts and acorns.
My wife then looked up from preparing her breakfast, and asks, “Aren’t acorns nuts?”
To which I replied, “Well, I… uh… I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“But acorns are hard fruits that grow on trees - nuts.”
I think about this, and then point out that pecans and walnuts have a full shell, but acorns only have a cap.
We finally concluded that between her Engineering degree and my Theater degree, we had no effing clue, so we turn to The Dope.
Acorns do have a shell fully surrounding the kernel; the cup is analogous to the spiny outer casing of a chestnut. Acorns are nuts by any definition that includes hazelnuts and walnuts.
acorn
–noun 1. the typically ovoid fruit or nut of an oak, enclosed at the base by a cupule.
2. a finial or knop, as on a piece of furniture, in the form of an acorn
Yes, an acorn is a nut. The shiny, brown surface of the acorn is the shell. Once it is dried, this shell can be easily cracked and the actual meat of the acorn will fall out; it is covered in a papery layer, much like a peanut.
It is probably worth noting that although they are nuts, acorns are not readily edible by humans. They can be made somewhat edible, but in their natural state, the nuts of most species contain far too much tannin to be palatable.
Basically preparation consists of grinding and repeated washing until most of the tannin is gone. I have (literally)tons of acorns in and around my garden now, so I suppose I ought to try it.
I think “most species” is a misstatement. I’ve eaten them. North American oak trees fall roughly into two categories, the white oak group and the red oak group. Many of the species in the white oak group have palatable acorns. The red oak group are too bitter to be eaten as is. The Indians even utilized these, though, by leaching the tannin out of them. The white oak group is a substantial number of species, some widely distributed, according to my field guide to North American trees.
One time I ate a bunch of acorns that were picked from a tree in somebody’s yard, and served along with an assortment of nuts. The homeowners explained that they ate the acorns off their tree all the time. I could see why. They were actually quite tasty.
Since you’re in Charlotte, may I recommend planting a willow oak(Quercus phellos). A seedling should be a six-foot tree within three years; a sapling, a shade tree in not much longer. There is a huge old tree, over a century old, in the backyard of a former farmhouse owned (and rented out) by my landlady, that has survived everything North Carolina weather can throw at it. The leaves are willow-like rather than normal oak leaves (and make excellent mulch), and the tree produces acorns every year.
I’ll happily stand corrected on that. For the record, I don’t live in America, but of course the OP does, and my statement regarding ‘most species’ was not qualified.
Most of the oaks here are English Oaks, although there are some other species dotted about that have been planted ornamentally. I think I’ll have to see if one of my local trees is dropping acorns I can eat.
According to this “Are Acorns Edible?” blurb backing up the “white oaks” / “red oaks” thing, English oaks are in the white oak group:
What I said about “palatable” may be a matter of taste, too. As noted there, all acorns are “edible” in that you aren’t going to poison yourself if you eat one, but you may find them too bitter to be worth eating, and you definitely will find the ones from the red oak group way too bitter to want to eat directly out of the shell. I don’t know what species ones I had in the shell were, but white oak is a commonly planted shade tree.
That’s interesting. Since edibility here seems to be reliably indicated by flavour (i.e. those that contain unacceptably high levels of tannins are going to be bitter and astringent), I think some experimental eating is called for.
Of course, I disclaim any responsibility for anything that might happen to you … just a postscript - I googled “acorn poisoning”, and found that it’s something that is reported in grazing livestock like cows, sheep and horses. Apparently, they have to eat quite a lot of them, and are probably munching on the leaves and twigs, too.
