7 delicious grocery store foods you may not recognize on the farm

Sean Kane

2016-06-24T13:34:00Z

When you bite into a chocolate bar, scoop up coffee beans, or savor a salty cashew, have you ever stopped to wonder what these foods look like before they're picked, processed, and packaged?

Much of what the western world loves to eat isn't what we think it is, and the way foods look coming out of the ground can seem alien compared to their appearance on grocery store shelves.

If you need a reminder of how separated many of us are from the growing of our food, look no further.

Here are some of the most popular foods in America that look radically different before they're harvested and put on sale.

1. Cashews look like nuts, taste like nuts, and are oh-so delicious.

But cashew nuts are not actual (botanical) nuts. The part most of us eat is actually the dangling seed of a cashew tree's apple. The flesh is eaten or fermented into alcohol in some countries.

Source: Purdue Horticulture

And we don't eat the whole seed. The outer shell contains a chemical that can cause a poison ivy-like reaction, since cashews are in the same plant family, so they're most often shelled.

2. Almonds are another non-nut.

They come from flowering trees that bear a kind of fruit known as a drupe (peaches and apricots are also drupes).

Source: Live Science

The drupe contains a shell with a seed inside, which is what we eat. Pictured below is a green almond drupe — the inner white seed is the part that will harden into an "almond."

3. Cocoa is quite a strange one. It's technically a fruit.

The plant is a tree that produces large ridged pods, which range in color from green to red to purple, depending on the cocoa variety, and turn yellow or orange as they ripen.

cocoa bean pod costa rica flickr roy luck ccby2

Source: Royal Botanic Garden

Split a pod open and you'll see white cocoa seeds, which are pulpy and sweet to the taste. The rind is discarded to expose the cocoa bean-filled seeds.

The pulp is mixed up with the beans (which aren't technically beans yet), heaped or spread out, and allowed to ferment and dry for days. This process is called "sweating" and it helps make cocoa less bitter and more sweet.

Source: Cocoa Symposium

Then the beans typically ship off to a processing facility, where they're ground into cocoa powder, then mixed it with milk, fat, and sugar to create chocolate.

4. Asparagus is a tasty spring vegetable — and a fast-growing flowering plant.

Asparagus is surprising in its simplicity. The shoots just grow right out of the ground.

Though if you let the shoots mature, they'll become tough and woody.

Source: Purdue Horticulture

5. Artichokes look strange to begin with, but their hearts hide a gorgeous secret.

They're actually giant thistle flowers that haven't yet opened up.

Source: Encyclopedia of Diderot (via University of Michigan)

When they bloom, it's a glorious bunch of purple composite flowers.

6. Coffee beans are similar to cocoa, since they're the seeds of a fruit.

They grown on tall bushes as red cherries or berries. The flavor is often described as hibiscus-like, but it's laced with some caffeine — which is why many plantations are starting to collect, package, and sell the juice.

Source: National Coffee Association USA

Within each cherry are two green seeds. These become the "beans" that get roasted, ground up, and brewed into coffee. But before all that, the flesh is stripped and the seeds are either dried out for weeks, or soaked in water and then dried out.

7. Brussels sprouts would look more normal growing on an alien planet.

The vegetable is part of the cabbage family, but the plants don't appear similar to cabbage at all. They're tall, budded stalks.

Source: Cornell University

Cut out of the ground, they look like some combination of a vegetable club and sleigh bells.

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