What the hell? I just found out that the nutmeg we’re all familiar with, the powdered spice, is the ground up seed of a fruit that looks like a green peach. I found lots of discussion on whether you can eat nutmeg and get high, or eat that red thing called “mace” that looks like bloody veins on the seed itself, but nothing about the fruit.
Can you eat that stuff? Does it taste good? And whoever came up with the weird idea of grounding up the seed of a fruit? Now I’m wondering if I can do that to the seed of an avocado or something…
While I don’t know for certain about the nutmeg fruit, in general, fruits are edible and seeds contain toxins. Plants want their seeds to stay intact so the next generation can grow. Ideally, an animal eats a whole fruit, and deposits the seed, intact, in a steaming pile of fresh fertilizer. For that to work, the animal has to be dissuaded from digesting the seed, which usually has a high concentration of protein, making it highly desirable.
It’s likely nutmeg plants work the same way, in this case the toxins causing, in small amounts, a fragrant flavour, but in large amounts causing illness. There would be no benefit and some detriment to create the same toxin in the flesh of the fruit.
Yes. I’ve eaten it in Malaysia. It’s like eating a tough little gelatinous beige-colored orange, with wonderful, intense nutmeg flavor. So intense, I could only stand a nibble at a time, and it took me a week to eat one little fruit.
ETA: I think my fruit was “cooked and crystallized”, as a post above mentions is done in Indonesia. I doubt anyone eats the raw fruit.