Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
This is an actual panel from the 34th issue of What If.

Some fiction will introduce similar or strange fruits and vegetables, often the object of a search and/or an important ingredient in something.

It should be noted that there are a fair number of real fruits and vegetables that can qualify as very strange, unusual, and exotic. (For example: the Durian, the Buddha's Hand, or the Miracle Fruit.) But of course, they have a slim chance of showing up in fiction due to Small Reference Pools, so you get fictional ones instead.

See also Magic Mushroom.

Examples of Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables include:

Anime and Manga

  • One Piece: the devil fruits that give eaters superpowers.
  • Rosario + Vampire: the monster Durian in Capu 2.
  • One chapter of Keroro Gunsou features a giant killer space yam.
  • Toriko is built on this trope and others like it.
  • Not used for laughs in the manga Sugar Dark where one of a series of monstrously sized, practically unstoppable undead Eldritch Abomination called "The Dark" had been buried under an tree, tainting and mutating its growing fruits with its essence. The adorable, yet horribly woobieish Moe, Meria, ate one of the fruits of the tree and absorbed its power, turning her into a Nigh Invincible creature whom members of the Masquerade use to lure the "The Dark" into killing and torturing her in various ways before they become incapacitated by the upcoming sunlight and buried into the ground, which is the only way of sealing them off from harming humanity.
  • the Dragon Ball franchise:,
    • Senzu beans. Grown at the Tower in the Sacred Land of Korin, eating even one of them provides nourishment for ten days and heals all wounds, injuries, and disease. Unfortunately, it seems Korin can only grow about a dozen of them per month in his garden; mass cultivation is likely impossible.
    • Ensenji fruit is like Senzu only much more powerful and rarer, growing only in the HFIL. Something of a Mythology Gag here, as they are a reference to the Peaches of Immortality in Journey to the West; in that work, the hero Sun Wukong (who Goku is loosely based on) steals several of these peaches and increases his own lifespan by several thousand years. To his credit, Goku only steals one of them.
  • Apricorns in Pokémon are large nuts that were used to make PokéBalls before modern technology replaced them with the more common ones. Kurt the blacksmith in Azalea town can still make specialized PokéBalls from them.

Comic Books

  • Gingold, a rare tropical fruit from the Yucatan in DC Comics. It was the basis for the formula that gave Ralph Dibny (the Elongated Man) his stretching abilities.
  • Spirou and Fantasio has a whole valley filled with fantastic fruits and vegetables. They all look horrible (ie, purple-brown skull-shaped peaches) but are actually delicious.

Literature

Willy Wonka: And when you lick a snozzberry, it tastes just exactly like a snozzberry...

  • Dr. Seuss likewise used them a lot.
  • C. S. Lewis describes some in his Perelandra. Of course, they are on Venus.
    • The Chronicles of Narnia had some as well. The Magician's Nephew has the tree with the silver apples—a direct reference to the Tree of Knowledge from The Bible—one of which cures Digory's mother's apparently fatal illness. There's also the toffee-fruit tree he and Polly plant, which is sadly never heard of again. Later, in The Silver Chair, it turns out that way beneath the surface of Narnia's world, precious metals and gems are living plants that produce fruit. And of course the heaven in The Last Battle has a tree whose fruit, in true C.S. Lewis style, can only be described by saying how much better it is than everything that exists in the real world.
  • The Queen's Museum and Other Fanciful Tales by Frank Stockton: the story Christmas Before Last has the Fruit of the Fragile Palm. It's similar to a coconut, but the inside is so delicious that it's worth as much as diamonds or pearls.
  • Dayig fruit, from Summers at Castle Auburn. The main character's uncle uses it to pose a sort of personality test to a hunting party: The fruit is absolutely delicious, but full of tiny, poisonous seeds. Would you risk trying it? Later subverted: the seeds aren't poisonous at all, and he was just playing mind games with the group.
  • Discworld features the wahoonie, a foul-smelling, earwax-colored root vegetable that can grow up to twenty feet in length. Ankh-Morpork is known as the Big Wahoonie, though the narration claims that not even the wahoonie smells that bad.
  • Loads in the Star Trek Novel Verse. Zalkatian Clamdas, Betazoid Hilrep, Horvas, Andorian Vithi, many, many more.
  • The Land of Oz featured a lot of these, such as the lunch pails growing on trees featured in Ozma of Oz.
  • Victorian artist and writer Edward Lear published a series of illustrations he called "Nonsense Botany" as parts of his nonsense collections released in 1871, 1872, and 1877. These included a variety of flowers and fruits, as can be seen here and here.

Live-Action TV

Prop Guy: So, now the scene reads, "Colonel Danning walks into the orchard, says 'How like Eden this world is', and bites into a painted kiwi."

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons and Dragons
    • Death's Head Tree. Its fruit resembles heads (those of the bodies the tree has eaten) that can spit seeds like bullets.
    • Forgotten Realms has many mundane plants distantly resembling what you can meet in our world (variants of berries, tubers, eggplants, pumpkins, citrus, etc), and the most unusual growth is darkberry (which collects shadowstuff and if crushed, releases a big blob of darkness), and hooded monk (plant that looks like one tubular leaf folded at the top, with the fruit at the bottom of the tube and poisonous gas filling the rest). Most strange plant materials are stuff like roots and petals.
    • Dark Sun has magic tied to life force more than usual, so the local way to make magic potions is to enchant the whole tree and collect fruits later. The seeds can even grow into more enchanted trees, but it's unreliable.
    • In the epic module Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, boons granted by Tharizdun take the form of strange black fruits (mostly plums, peaches, or cherries) that appear after certain actions are taken in unholy sites dedicated to him. The PCs can gain these boons, though it's always dangerous.
  • Changeling: The Lost features Goblin Fruits, fruits that grow only in the Hedge. The fruits range in appearance from "like typical fruit, only in slightly off colors" to "resembling everything from roughly-carved human heads to icicles to ovaries." Most of them have a beneficial effect on changeling metabolism, allowing them to heal damage, but a good number of the fruits have side effects, such as increased alertness, unceasing hunger, guaranteed fertility, or the temporary ability to understand any spoken language.
  • Traveller: in a side story in Intersteller Wars, one spacer visits a planet that is unique as a garden world that can instantly evolve its life to fit any new change. The spacer eats a local fruit and finds it delicious but shocks a local farmer who told him it had been poisonous the day before.
  • Used to Squickiest effect in the monster list "Dark Menagerie" of Scarred Lands. Gaurak the Glutton, one of the titans sealed into the land of Scarn by the gods, would offer his most devoted followers tainted greasy melons that turn them into disgusting, greasy folds of fat hardly able to walk and swarming with lard worms that eat anything unlucky enough to suffocate in their folds.
    • Similarly, a plant that had been tainted among a corrupted forest by one of the titan's blood after it was felled by the gods, is a gnarled tree covered in fruits with tormented faces on them that corrupts any creature that eats it, making the unfortunate victim willing to defend the tree with their lives. Some particularly vile cults and evil worshipers willingly corrupt themselves by drinking its juice.

Toys

  • Bionicle has Bula (berries that restore energy), Madu (explosive coconuts), and Thornax (spiky, sometimes explosive, fruit used as Edible Ammunition).

Video Games

  • Pokémon has a wide variety of berries since their introduction in generation II that can improve a Mon's abilities. Since generation III, they have Punny Names like the titular Mons.
    • Heck, there's even Pokemon who are fruits or vegetables: Exeggecute, Sunkern, Seedot, Ludicolo, Tropius (technically its banana beard), Cherubi, Cherrim, Whimiscott (based on the cotton plant as well as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary), Ferroseed and Ferrothorn (if horse-chestnuts are considered as "fruit"). There's also Applin, an apple-Mon that can evolve into three flavors of apple pie Mon!
    • And Pokémon Scarlet and Violet introduces Capsakid and its evolved form, Scovillain, which are hot pepper Mons.
    • There are also a series of inedible fruits in the Johto region called apricorns that served as the invention of the first Pokeball.
  • The mushrooms from the Super Mario Bros. series.
  • Everything found in the Shivering Isles Expansion Pack of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with a large side order of Fungus Humongous.
  • Any World of Mana series game that allows you to own an orchard.
  • The Sims 3 has life fruits, which give the Sim who eats one an extra day of life, flame fruits, which aren't actually on fire but do give you a warm fuzzy feeling just by carrying it around, and plasma fruits, which re-fills a vampire Sim's Thirt motive.
  • The Kingdom Hearts series has the star-shaped Paopu fruit, which supposedly links the destinies of those who share one.
  • The Tales (series) games have, in addition to the usual selection of apples, bananas, etc., a pair of recurring fictional fruits called "kirima" and "amango".
  • Sonic the Hedgehog games seem to have these, when there's a Chao-raising virtual pet minigame. In the original Sonic Adventure, at least, you have cubicle fruit, triangle fruit, and round fruit, and then more special ones like Chao fruit,[1] and heart fruit.[2] There are also the mushrooms, which increase the hidden intelligence and luck stats and look suspiciously like Mario 1-Up mushrooms.

Web Comics

  • In Poharex there's the Blue Fruit, which grow only in a certain valley, and cause addiction, madness, and eventually paralysis.
  • The Lydian Option features both a cafeteria full of "cross-nutritional" foods for multiple species and a highly addictive alien fruit.

Web Games

  • Neopets uses an assortment of them.

Web Original

  • "Dogscape", one of Creepypasta's creepiest and Squicktastic stories had the "puppy fruits".
  • SCP Foundation's SCP-156 ("Reanimating Pomegranate") is an SCP inspired by the myth of Persephone. Anyone who eats one of these 181 cursed pomegranate seeds between March 22nd and September 20th will die on September 21st (of no apparent cause); if eaten during the rest of the year, the death is immediate. Either way the victim is returned to life on March 21st; this will continue every year until the victim dies of some other means (possibly by asphyxiation after being Buried Alive, something that happened to many victims before the SCP confiscated it). Victims have no memory of what happened while dead, although psychological effects that occur after it happens three or four times (like fear of dogs and dead plants) suggest they were indeed in the Underworld of Greek Mythology. The seeds themselves cannot be destroyed permanently, and if eaten, spoiled, or destroyed otherwise, they simply reappear in the container used to store them.

Western Animation

  • Chowder has nothing but these.
  • Treasure Planet had purple lemons that crunch like apples. They were called Purps.
  • Just about anything the Kiwi can grow on Galaxy Rangers. An episode involved trees that grew nutritious marshmallows.
  • In one episode of Futurama, among the gifts given to Fry after he leaves the Planet Express to sleep in Bender's apartment is a miniature fruit salad tree offered by Leela. Fry picks a tiny banana among the half-inch sized fruits, eats it, and tosses the skin on the floor (which Amy promptly slips on).
  • Beast Machines: in the episode "Forbidden Fruit" one of their newest team members, a techno-organic vehicon with a bat mode named Nightscream, offers the members fruits from a towering organic fruit tree to help their organic components. However, the fruit magnifies their bestial sides that dominates over their robotic minds, turning them animalistic and feral. The maximals are restored when Cheetor (the only one who rejected the fruit out of misguided suspicion of Nightscream) cuts down the tree's trunk.
  • Much of the action in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Family Appreciation Day" involves the Apple family being busy with the harvest of Zap Apples, a magical breed of apple that sprouts delicious rainbow-colored fruit... fruit which only grows following a series of ominous-looking signs, and which disappears not long after if it's not picked as soon as possible.
  • Tomacco, from The Simpsons episode "E-I-E-I-D'oh!", a hybrid of tomato and tobacco created when Homer accidentally planted both near dumped plutonium rods. They taste terrible (Ralph Wiggum says they "taste like grandma", an opinion his father quickly agrees with) but are highly addictive, both to humans and animals. They made Homer quite a lot of money until the wildlife ate the entire crop, except one plant that was stolen by executives from the Laramie cigarette company. They would have gotten away too, had not a tomacco-crazed sheep gotten onboard their helicopter and caused it to crash, killing almost everyone on board - the sheep, fortunately, survived.
  • In the original ThunderCats, the Berbils raised a wide variety of fruits that mimiced the taste and nutritive qualities of other fruits, including Meat Fruit, Veggie Fruit, Bread Fruit, and Candy Fruit, the last being the most popular. There are also Trollberry bushes, the leaves of which are the sole food in a Trollog's diet; an evil race called the Giantors are extorting the Trollogs in one episode, occupying the mountains where the Trollberry bushes grow and threatening to destroy them unless the Trollogs do their bidding.
  • Gummi Berries in Adventures of the Gummi Bears, bush-grown fruit that comes in red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple varieties. The berries are edible and tasty, but do nothing on their own, but are the primary ingredients of Gummiberry Juice, a potion that makes the Gummis themselves able to bounce, and acts as a strength potion for humans and ogres.
  1. ↑ shaped like Chao heads, increases a Chao's normal stats for every bite
  2. ↑ pink and heart-shaped, makes a Chao fertile and interested in breeding with other Chao
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