My Mouth Is the Tool
An evolutionary approach to cleaning persimmon seeds
Is it possible to get sick from cleaning persimmon seeds? I’m not talking about any problems from toxins or parasites (I know of neither from fully ripe persimmons), but rather simply stuffing yourself with too much delicious, candy-sweet pulp. I guess there’s nothing you can’t eat too much of. Any stomach has a finite volume, of which less is available, of course, if you attempt to utilize it after lunch.
Readers of this blog will recall that I love American persimmons this time of year. They’re a wild treat that I enjoy finding on walks in the woods, though I mostly gather them from cultivated trees in parks (raising some interesting questions about how to think of urban foraging).
This year I’m playing around with tree propagation, and I’d like to try growing some of my favorite trees, like persimmons. For something like acorns you just pick them up off the ground. For hickories you have to do a little more work: let them dry a bit and then pop off the hulls. For persimmons, though, you’ve got a pulpy mess of a fruit to clean off before you can work with the seed.
Of course persimmons didn’t evolve with their seeds getting cleaned by human hands. Like pretty much all fleshy fruits, they evolved getting cleaned by animal digestive systems. A deer (or fox, or raccoon, or opossum, or turkey, or any of the other gillion species that enjoy persimmons) eats the persimmon from the forest floor where it fell, and down it goes. The deer digests the fleshy, sweet part, and then the seed plops out in the deer’s poop. The seed wakes up in the spring ensconced in a bed of fertilizer after a winter sitting on the forest floor.
I suppose one way to prepare persimmon seeds would be to fully emulate the deer, but of course I’d be trading one mess for another (stinkier) one. So I meet the fruit halfway and just use my mouth. I pop the persimmons in, eat the pulp, and spit the seeds out, ready to be prepped for the winter*. There’s a slightly tougher envelope of flesh around the seed (akin to the little blob of jelly around a tomato seed) that I wager is a beffer against stomach acids. It would ordinarily be stripped off before the seed emerges from its animal assistant. I found it pretty simple to remove it with my teeth.
Last Thursday a friend who also plans to propagate persimmons came by with a heap of mushy persimmons. I kept amazing him by eating yet-more-rotten-looking persimmons until the heap was gone.
Yesterday after lunch, work took me to a block not far from a couple persimmon trees planted in Fairmount Park. So I took that short detour, set a timer for five minutes (lest I spend all day stuffing my face with persimmons), and went to work. When the alarm sounded I had a nice haul of persimmon seeds in my jar and apparently a little too much food in my belly for the bike ride home. I made it, but it took an hour to feel right again.
*A lot of seeds have evolved mechanisms to ensure they sprout at the right tie of the year, usually in the spring. So before you plant them, you have to imitate winter by packing them in a damp substrate in a cool place for a few months. I am using a container of damp vermiculite in our fridge.