Nuts

I'm reading this book called Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, Scientific knowledge, and The Teaching of Plants. In it, she's writing about how when her people (the Pottawatomie) were displaced and ended up in Kansas, they were relieved to find a nut (which they called pigan.) It later came to be called pecan in English.

"Today we eat them daintily, shelled and toasted, but in the old times they'd boil them up in a porridge. The fat floated to the top like a chicken soup and they skimmed it and stored it as nut butter: good winter food. High in calories and vitamins -- everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that's the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life."

That's the part I never thought about…That a nut is actually an embryo.

Did you ever think that before?