Are Osage Oranges Edible? Maybe—if You Stick to the Seeds
Pondering the Osage orange, the historically important fruit you probably shouldn’t eat — unless you’re willing to go to the trouble of picking out the seeds.
This piece is adapted from a recent piece of Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet. Here’s the original version.
Of the many strange niches one can find on YouTube, the most interesting might be that spearheaded by Jared Rydelek, a man who has gained some notice on YouTube for tracking down rare kinds of fruit to try out. His channel, Weird Explorer, features him mostly talking about the weird fruits he’s eaten over the years, often while traveling. (It’s a very specific niche.)
Clearly, this takes him a lot of strange directions, including in the direction of one of the most unusual-yet-common fruits you might find in the U.S., the Osage orange, which might also be called a hedge apple or horse apple. The tree that bears its fruit is most commonly associated with Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, though it’s become common around the continental U.S. It’s considered more prized for its dense wood than its fruit, which is, to put it simply, weird.
