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Some of the most overused and abused words are nitrogen-fixers, legume, fruit and vegetables.
We are so fixated on these words, we have confused ourselves to the point that a recent commercial continues the trend by stating a peanut is not a nut.
Of course, when I looked it up, just to see what the internet has to say, it says a peanut is a legume.
Oh yeah, the mysterious elusive legume family.
Truth is, a legume is just a sub-sub-sub classification.
A peanut is a nut and a legume.
Further information on the internet states that a peanut is not a nut; however, a peanut is a fruit.
Based on this logic, then a legume is a fruit.
What is a legume? Some say a legume is a dry fruit. Some say it is fruit inside a pod.
Again this brings me to the point of nitrogen-fixers. Legumes have been anointed as the nitrogen-fixers of the world. This is quite ridiculous. Many more plants fix nitrogen. Also, many other plants and all plants perform fertilizing services to the soil ecosystem, thus eventually to themselves.
We know this in a roundabout connective way, because even lightning fixes nitrogen and some bacteria fix nitrogen. Legumes are not the only and best nitrogen-fixers in town. Furthermore, by reason of extension, if there is a necessity for nitrogen to be fixed by multiple components of the ecosystem, then there must be multiple components fixing other nutrients.
Why are we not talking about phosphorus-fixers or potassium-fixers or micronutrient fixers or trace mineral fixers? You can be certain that plants, as one of the anchors of life, are contributing to the transformation of most of the nutrients in the soil.
It's time for us to stop the information confusion.
We have fallen in love with words such as legume, nitrogen-fixers and protein, just so we can sound like we understand more than we know. We have taken an a la carte approach to consciousness. All of this is ridiculously, so modern in a miseducated way.
When we keep saying a tomato is not a vegetable, it's a fruit, we are splitting hairs. The distinction between what is a fruit and vegetable has been made bigger than the actual difference.
Even so, despite similarities and differences, all vegetables are fruit and all fruit are vegetables.
All of it is plant food and food from plants.
The words, fruit and vegetables, are just words that serve to confuse us more than to help us understand we are splitting hairs unnecessarily, improperly dividing the word of truth.
This is why, despite supposedly being more educated, we are still malnourished.
It matters not what is a fruit or a vegetable. It matters that we eat as many parts of the plant that are edible. We don't need to eat a wide variety. We only need to eat a handful of choices in season grown properly and prepared properly. Understanding this will help us stop paying high prices for things out of season because we think we need them.
So now we come full circle in logic. To state a peanut is not a nut is about as wrong as stating a pineapple is not an apple.
Relatively speaking, the differences are minute. If we focus and magnify these differences, so as to consider them significantly or totally different, we are living proof that our fixation is goofiness.
Replanting A Gardener's Golden Grail: Nitrogen-Fixing Fixation
Food Fight With Seeds. Food Fight #23
See also “simple nutrition plant”
In a related insanity, we love to talk about mammals as if that's one group, yet we know there are many mammals that are non-human and mammals that live in the water such as whales. So whales, cows and humans are mammals but a tomato is a fruit and an eggplant is a vegetable and a whale is not a fish. A whale is more like a human than a whale is like shark. Huh? Our categories and classifications do more harm than good to our understandings.
“The largest pool of nitrogen available in the terrestrial ecosystem is gaseous nitrogen from the air, but this nitrogen is not usable by plants, which are primary producers. Gaseous nitrogen is transformed, or "fixed," into more-readily available forms such as ammonia through the process of nitrogen fixation by natural means, especially by microorganisms (prokaryotes) in the soil. Ammonia can then be used by plants or converted to other forms.”
