I was just at the supermarket, and I noticed passion fruit flavored ice cream. Passion fruit is considered a nuisance around here, and I was wondering if I ate that ice cream and pooped out a seed or two, would it be able to propagate?
Apart from the general sense in which ice cream may not represent the ideal storage medium for certain types of seeds, there are three main factors at play:
Cooking - If the mixture containing the seeds has been cooked at any point during preparation, the seeds will almost certainly be dead.
Freezing - Some plant species produce seeds that can survive low temperatures (others produce seeds that absolutely require a period of chilling, or they will not germinate). I don’t think passion fruits are in either of those groups, as they are generally tropical to warm temperate plants.
Mechanical damage - obviously if the seeds are crushed or ground up into bits, they’re not going to grow (are they visible in the ice cream? - passion fruit seeds are usually conspicuously visible - dark brown or black and 3 mm or so across)
try it and see:D
Another factor I forgot to mention - the human digestive system - some seeds are designed to survive comparatively short and rapid transit through the digestive systems of birds - and may not make it through a human in viable condition.
Another factor, fruit that is grown for human consumption is often a hybrid that produces sterile seeds. I don’t know if that is true of passion fruit.
I think a bigger problem is that your poop generally ends up in the sewers or a cesspool.
FWIW, tomato plants can often sprout from sewage (if left undisturbed appropriately, of course); I don’t know whether the plants come from seeds that have passed through the digestive tract, or non-eaten waste that made it to the sewage system.
Back thirty years ago when the U.S. was getting serious about sewage treatment and people were looking for unknown sewage outfalls, they’d look for tomato plants growing on the bank as indicators of untreated sewage being released somewhere upstream.
What about a strawberry or raspberry seed?
Raspberry seeds require stratification (a period of chilling) in order to germinate. Strawberries don’t absolutely require it, but tolerate freezing.
But commercial ice cream is likely to be made fruit that has been cooked - often with the seeds strained out anyway.