Has anyone mentioned cranberries? I mean, I don’t think they’d hurt you, but they are so hard and sour that they are virtually useless until they’re cooked and combined with some sort of sweetness.
Rhubarb has to be cooked, and I don’t think the leaves are edible under any circumstances.
Actually, that’s what I came into this thread to mention. And IIRC the modern cranberry, grown in the bogs, is not the natural critter, either. It wasn’t until roughly the 1880’s that someone developed a way to grow them in a manner that made them edible that they became linked to holiday dinners. The Native American tribes of New England used the silly things for money, which doesn’t seem reasonable if you’d be going out and eating your cash.
tree
n.
b. A plant or shrub resembling a tree in form or size.
I have no idea where this idea that bananas don’t grow on trees came from. Tree is an English word, not a botanical term. And banas defintiely meet the standard, hence the reason for the use of the term banana tree in common English.
It came from botanists.
Actually, it’s both.
Huh? I’ve picked wild cranberries and eaten them raw by the handful plenty of times. Yes, they’re tart, they’re not as sweet as most berries, but they aren’t useless, especially if you don’t have access to a supermarket.
My mother has a recipe that uses raw cranberries chopped in a food processor with some orange and orange peel. It is sweetened, but not cooked.
Well, no. (BTW, I’m a botanist.)
That link says that a banana is technically regarded as herbaceous, which is correct since it lacks secondary growth or reinforced pith. What it doesn’t say is that a banana is not a tree. There are any number of trees that are non-woody but nonetheless indisputably still trees: palms, boabs etc.
Actually it’s not.
There are an infinite number of different defintions of tree depending on the botanical body or even the individual botanist involved. Certainly botanists will use the word tree, but it is defined by user, not by any universal standard beyond the English one. For example you might find a botanical paper using tree to mean all woody vegetation over 5 metres in height, or referring to all woody plants with a single stem, or referring to all self-supporting vegetation greater than 2 metres.
The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature came up with a very concise defintion of a tree… which botanists around the world totally ignored because it was patently stupid. The ICBN defintion excluded most conifers, a great many acacias, quite a few eucalypts and many other plants from being trees. Huge areas of the planet were covered in plants that sure looked like trees, but apparen but weren’t. Yet the ICBN defntion is the closest you wil ever get to a botanical standard for the word ‘tree’.
If the term isn’t specifically defined the normal English definition applies by default.
I’m not particularly intertested to continue this silly nitpicking any further; you know what I mean; I know what I meant; my point was not entirely invalid. Your statement above is simply untrue; the link does actually say that; you may argue that it’s wrong, but it says it there in black and white.
Freshly harvested cacao beans are bitter and acid to the taste. They must be fermented before they’re even sent to the processing plant.
If my statement that “what it doesn’t say is that a banana is not a tree” is completely untrue than quote where it does say that a banana is not a tree. My statement is provably true and you are simply lying. That page does not say that a banana is not a tree.
What you are trying to say is no different from " this reference says that a poodle is a dog, therefore it can not also be a pet". The two terms aren’t mutually exclusive. Just as a poodle can be both a dog and a pet so a banana can be both herbaceous and a tree.
There is absolutely no merit is saying that a Doberman isn’t a pet simply because you have a reference showing that it is a dog. Yet that is effectively what you have done.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing when coupled with a lot of misunderstanding.
I’m done here, seriously.
Hmm that is definitely news to me, and to countless kids who grew up begging their moms for a paper cup of sugar. Sure, its tart, but a fresh stalk of rhubab–bite, dip in sugar, bite, dip again.
Yum. It was the best snack in the spring before the ice cream guys started making their rounds.
Yum.
Here’s some info on rhubarb.
But it’s the leaves, not the stalks.
::: Moderator clears throat for attention ::::
Blake, you will kindly refrain from personal insults in this forum. Please note the difference, perhaps a fine point but a difference nonetheless, between “Your statement is untrue” and “You are lying.” The former is an acceptable comment; the latter is NOT, at least, not here.
And the gratuitous comment about “a little knowledge” is petty and snarky. Cool it. Especially in a discussion that seems to be merely a matter of definition.
You’d think that almond bark could be eaten right off the tree; in fact, it isn’t bark at all, and you can’t get it without cooking. 
In a Grape-Nuts commercial, wild-food stalker Euell Gibbons said, “Every eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” I mis-heard parts as “farts,” and we spent a lot of time giggling over “Euell Gibbons Toasted Pine Farts.” 
According to Jeffrey Steingarten, broad beans, millet, bamboo shoots, and cassava contain cyanogens. Once cooked the poison is rendered harmless. Undercooked chickpeas can cause lathyrism- spinal lesions that cause paralysis.
Source, The Man Who Ate Everything, from the chapter Salad The Silent Killer, which is a quite entertaining essay on the ways raw vegetables can kill you.
As far as I recall, most grains are edible (meaning they won’t kill you) but much less nutritious raw. You can eat raw pasta, but you won’t get as much out of it as you would if it were cooked.
I munch on raw corn kernels while waiting for the water to boil. 
They’re a bit starchy, but not poisonous.
Bananas can be eaten right off the “tree”.
I was hiking just north of Waimanu Valley on the Big Island of Hawaii (Laupahoehoe Nui) when we came upon hundreds and hundreds of banana plants that had been originally planted by the ancient Hawaiians that inhabited the area. Unlike apples or oranges, banana plants ripen their fruit year round so lots of fruit was hanging on the stalks in various stages of ripeness. We ate several big, beautiful yellow bananas right off the tree and they were the best bananas I’ve ever eaten.