weird fruits #1

11/22/2025

the other night, my boyfriend surprised me with a bottle of wine and a pomegranate! this was the first time i'd ever actually eaten a pomegranate so i was super excited. i am a big fan of new fruits, and i just find plants in general to be very weird and fun to learn about. my current favorite is the osage orange. 1

anyways, he showed me how to divide them up and get the seeds out, which i enjoyed. i feel like i need to mention that while i knew what the inside of a pomegranate looked like, the texture threw me way off! the seeds were super crisp instead of squishy and the flavor was not at all what i expected (but a nice surpise). that was all it took to send my down a wikipedia rabbit hole on pomegranates! (guess i'm easy to please). my favorite discoveries are below, enjoy!

what is a pomegranate, really?

immediate surprise here! pomegranates are not a tree but a shrub, who knew. they're in the plant family Lythraceae 2. the name "pomegranate" comes from the Latin for "seeded apple", but even better! The French word for it, grenade, is what military grenades are named after, surprisingly.

i must admit at this point i got a little carried away with fruit anatomy, but that's the coolest part! so i'll give the short version (via handy visual aid!)

hover me!

pericarp sarcotesta mesocarp

what gives pomegrantes their color?

i find the color of pomegranates super pretty, that nice deep red. i spend lots of my time reading papers on color and pigments for work 3 so no surprise it drew my attention! the chemicals that give the pomegranate its signature color are anthocyanins and ellagitannins, which aren't always dark red, but i'll get to that. pomegranates also have lots of polyphenols4, which is why their juice stains easily!

anthocyanins (from the ancient Greek for "dark blue flower") are a type of polyphenol and cause all kinds of beautiful plant colors. they also protect them against extreme cold!

i couldn't find much on ellagitannins, but they're a type of phenol too!

i hope you now find the pomegranate as interesting as i do! and i will leave you with my favorite #pomfact: the main variety of these guys in the united states is called "Wonderful".

wonderful, indeed

  1. which i think is actually a kind of fig!
  2. crape myrtles were the only other plants in this family that i knew, but im no botanist haha
  3. im a phd student, although my research is with animals
  4. they're pretty in their own way i think