Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables
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.
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
- Roald Dahl liked these. Snozzcumbers from The BFG (which were so disgusting the giants preferred to eat children instead, with the exception of the titular character who put up with the foul taste) come to mind.
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Willy Wonka: And when you lick a snozzberry, it tastes just exactly like a snozzberry... |
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- 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-lunch pails growing on trees featured in Ozma of Oz
Live Action Television
- Invoked offscreen in the Show Within a Show Wormhole X-Treme, when Martin Lloyd tells a prop guy to "get some kiwis and spray-paint them green" for a scene, instead of using apples.
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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." |
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Mythology
- The fruit of the lotus tree in Greek Mythology, which caused both sleepiness and addiction. (The tree is the Trope Namer for the Lotus Eater Machine, by the way.)
- The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which is believed to grow sheep as its fruit.
Tabletop RPG
- 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.
- 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 Swords And Sworcery. 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. 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 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 http://dogscape.blogspot.com/2010/10/log-one.html had the "puppy fruits".
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.