Southeastern Fruits

What the plate gets wrong

The picture was generated, and these are its errors of fact, checked against the kitchen and the Lexicon. Read the plate with them.

• Pecans prints “Pecans, listed among the fruits, Georgia, October to November”. Pecans are a nut, not a fruit, so treat this tile as the region's nut even though Georgia and the October to November harvest are correct. In the kitchen pecans are shelled, toasted and handled with walnuts and almonds, and the app's Lexicon files pecan in the nut and seed atlas as one of the fattest nuts in use at around 72 percent oil.
• Magnolias prints “Magnolias (Sweetbay), Southeast, Spring, Flavor Citrus, Floral, Creamy”. Sweetbay magnolia is a flower, not a fruit; its petals can be pickled or used as a gingery garnish and its leaves stand in for bay, but no magnolia fruit is eaten. The tile illustrates and names the blossom, and the tree's actual fruit is a woody cone of red seeds with no culinary use.
• Pineapple prints “Florida, March to June”. Pineapple is not a commercial Florida crop today; fresh pineapple on a Southeastern menu is imported, mostly from Costa Rica, with Hawaii the only United States producer. Florida's Indian River pineapple industry ended about a century ago and survives only in backyards, so a cook should not source or season it as Floridian.
• Avocado prints “Florida, Year-round”. Florida avocados are in season from about June through January, not year-round; the year-round supply on most menus is Hass from Mexico and California. Florida grows the green-skin West Indian and Guatemalan types, which are harvested from early summer into winter with nothing from Florida in spring.
• Pomegranate prints “Southeast, October to December”. Pomegranates in the United States are a California crop harvested September through December; Southeastern plantings are small trial orchards with no commercial supply a kitchen could buy locally. Well over nine tenths of American pomegranates come from California's San Joaquin Valley, and the humid Southeast is a marginal, disease-prone site for the fruit.
• Kiwi prints “Florida, November to April”. Kiwifruit is not a Florida crop; American kiwi is grown in California and picked in October and November, with only small plantings in Georgia and Alabama, and the November to April window is the cold-stored and imported supply season. Fuzzy kiwi needs hundreds of winter chill hours that Florida cannot supply, and the Lexicon notes kiwi is climacteric and picked hard, which is why stored fruit sells all winter regardless of where it grew.
• Cranberry prints “Southeast, October to December”. Cranberries are not a Southeastern crop; the United States harvest comes from cold northern bogs in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington, picked September to November. Cranberries need cold winters and acidic bog conditions the Southeast does not have, and none of the nine states on the plate's own region line has commercial cranberry bogs.
• Starfruit prints “Florida, May to September”. Florida carambola fruits from about June through February in two flushes, late summer and midwinter, so the winter crop is the larger one and May is too early. Florida is the right region, but spring is the leanest time for South Florida carambola trees, the opposite of what the plate prints.