This is food. That might be kind of hard to believe if, like me, you don't come from a culture
where people eat cactus. But nearly every part of this plant is edible, and potentially quite
tasty. There are obviously hazards — hazards both glaring and insidious. I'm going to tell
you everything I learned trying to prepare this very angry plant for human consumption.
Parts of me still hurt. Lots of cacti have edible parts, but this is a classic: a prickly pear,
known to science as the opuntia genus. It's named after the city of Opus in ancient Greece,
which was reputed to have an edible plant that could be grown by simply jamming its leaves into
the ground. The leaves would send out roots. And indeed, you can grow prickly pear that way. Just
take basically any chunk of the plant, stick it in the ground and it can send out roots.
However, this almost certainly was not the plant in ancient Opus that Theophrastus wrote about.
Why? Because like most cactuses, opuntia is native to the Americas. And that genus includes hundreds
of distinct species, abundant across the warmer parts of the Western hemisphere. Very big in Latin
American cuisine. I have no idea which particular species of prickly pear this is, because it's just
random plant hanging out in my neighborhood in Macon, Georgia, in front of this vacant lot. The
house here burned down a few years ago. Whomever lived here, many decades ago, planted this cactus
right on the border with their neighbor, which tells you a lot about what their relationship
must have been like. I've walked by that plant thousands of times. And like half of the year,
it has these big purple fruits on it. And they are true fruits. Berries. They have soft, sweet
and sour flesh containing a pulpy core of little seeds. In Spanish they call the fruit tuna — no
etymological relation to tuna fish, as far as I can tell. Applied to cactus fruits, tuna is a word
of indigenous American origin. The tuna grow up from the outer leaves called paddles or pads — or
in Spanish, nopales. Both the tuna and the nopales are edible, but are best at different times of the
year. The tuna generally ripen in the fall. It's actually winter here right now. It's New Year's
Day as I record this and there's still a ton of fruit ripening on that plant. Most people seem
to agree the best paddles or nopales are the new growth paddles that sprout up in the springtime.
Those are lighter green and more tender than the mature paddles that we see on here right now.
You can tell the tuna are ripe when they are, of course, no longer green like that one,
and when they twist almost effortlessly off the plant. Yeah, twisting I've found is the motion you
want to use, not pulling. And yes, for god's sake, use tongs. The first time I tried to harvest fruit
from that thing, I thought, Oh, this is going to be easy. I can see the spines really, really
clearly. All I have to do is just kind of grab it between the spines. Bad idea, because lurking
around all those big conspicuous thorns are many more nearly microscopic ones called glochids,
or glochidia. And these are little demons straight from the fires of Hades. They are the worst.
Some varieties of prickly pear have more glochids than others, and it may depend on the season, but
basically anytime I've gotten near that thing, I have noticed some weird telltale pains later.
If you look with a much more powerful microscope, you can see the glochids are barbed.
All you have to do is brush past them and they'll hook into your skin and release from the plant.
You might not even notice them going in. And even if you do, yeah, you can pull out the part that's
above the skin, but not the barbed tips. They just break off and stay inside you. And what
does that feel like? Well, I've got one in the tip of this finger right now and I don't feel
it at all unless pressure is applied. Then I feel this minor, but sharp pain. That made typing this
script this morning a lot of fun. I also always notice this generalized, dull aching in my skin,
like a 'handache.' And it takes a few days to go away. This may be due to a general inflammation
or dermatitis caused by glochids. Some people seem to have a particularly strong reaction to them.
And if you just carelessly brush past one of these plants when you're out hiking or something,
you could just instantaneously be covered in millions of these little glochids. It's going
to be a problem. In the 1980s. Some researchers at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy found that you
can almost entirely prevent the inflammation by immediately removing the exposed part of
the glochids with tweezers, and then applying a household glue, letting it dry, and then ripping
it off. You basically give your glochid tips a bikini wax. Just use tongs. Tongs are good. Right
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Now, as bad as glochids feel on your skin, imagine how they would feel on your tongue or in your
throat. Let's talk about how you actually eat these. A popular method among hikers is to eat
them right off the plant. You grab a stick and just poke the blossom end of the fruit with it,
just to hold it steady. There's a little belly button there that you can poke. Then
you just fillet off the sides of skin with your knife. I've read in several botanical texts that
ripe fruits will drop their glochids. They'll drop when they're really ripe.
For what it's worth, there's lots of clearly very ripe fruit out on that plant right now,
and they still have tons of glochids on them — to the point where I needed to wipe the loose
glochids off my knife before I proceeded with this step, where you just fillet the edible flesh right
off the seed core in the middle. The seeds aren't poisonous or anything, but they are very hard.
You can't crunch through them like papaya seeds. What does it taste like? Purple. I
think it tastes purple. It has a generic fruity taste, but also a slight vegetal taste as well,
which I actually quite like. Oh Lordy, there's a thorn. There's a thorn! Nah, nah, I'm just
kidding. The less ripe ones are way more acidic, but devotees will know that's just fine with me.
Very nice. But truthfully, there just really isn't that much fruity flesh on this thing. So
much of it is those pulpy seeds. So something that people do a lot of the time is simply juice it,
because there's tons of good juice in that pulp. Problem is, you can't just wash them and toss
them in a blender. The skin has all those glochids in it and they're small enough to pass through a
strainer and into your juice. Now, I've seen some people simply grab the fruit with tongs, put it
under running water and just scrub away at it with a really stiff scrubby. Then you just have to wash
and rinse it several times to make sure you have washed away all the loose glochids. Maybe that
works with the store-bought variety, which I have noticed seem to have fewer glochids on them. But
these are just covered in them. So we have to do something else. An ancient method among indigenous
peoples is apparently to roll the fruits around in sand, quite vigorously. The abrasive sand,
theoretically, dislodges all the prickles and then you can wash them off. Theoretically. Another
traditional method is to kill them with fire. Now we're talking. If you look really close, you can
actually see the glochids igniting and shriveling up. People who have gas stoves often do this
over the flame from their burner. That'd probably work a lot better than this little fire stick.
My kitchen torch is out of butane. This is going to take forever. You know what we need? Now we're
talking. Yeah — die, glochids, die. The campfire is apparently a traditional method as well.
Just don't keep them in the heat for too long or they will burst open. Then you can bring them
inside and wash them off. And people say you can then just cut them in half and simply peel the
skin off with your fingers. That did not work too well for me. It would have helped if I trimmed off
the blossom and stem ends first. The skin really sticks around there. I found the easiest thing for
me was to hold the fruit upright with a fork and fillet off the skin. I imagine peeling with your
fingers works better with the bigger, store-bought fruit. Then you can mash them up by hand or just
drop them in a blender or a food processor. People usually put in a little water just to
help everything flow around the blades, and whiz it smooth. Strain out the seeds and pulp,
and there you have it. People will boil that down and make candies with it. Or they'll just stir
in some simple syrup, maybe some lime juice. And there, you have a lovely little soft drink — agua
fresca de tuna. I am simply going to spike mine with a little tequila and call it a day.
Is it worth it? I'm not so sure. Is it delicious? Absolutely. Oh, the paddles. The fresh nopales I
see for sale in Latin grocery stores seem to only have the big conspicuous thorns that you
can easily shave off with a knife. This one from the plant up the street has got tons of glochids
on it too. So, kill them with fire. Die, die. Yeah, you could just shave them off with the skin,
but when they inevitably fall off in the process, they would get stuck in that very
sticky flesh. Nopales are filled with mucilage — that gluey polysaccharide that makes okra slimy,
texture-wise. The slime does not bother me much at all when eating it raw, and I do very much
like it raw. If the tuna or the fruit is sort of a vegetal-tasting fruit, the paddles, the nopales,
are to me kind of sort of a fruity-tasting vegetable. It's like if green beans were a sour
fruit. Though, apparently if you harvest the pads in the morning, their acid content will be lower.
The slime becomes much more unpleasant to me when you cook these. In Mexican food, a lot of
the times they will boil these and then strain and wash them to get a lot of that slime out.
Well-prepared, they do they make a very tasty taco filling. I have not well-prepared them.
But there you have it. Be safe, and go taste of the forbidden fruit — if you dare.