Short Stuff: Macadamia Nuts

Macadamia nuts aren't nuts! They're seeds! And they are delicious. And good for you in the right amount. Learn all about them today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Paine. Welcome to short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's
Jerry over there, and this is short stuff about macadamia nuts.
You heard me, macadamia nuts. I love macadamia nuts. I
do you too. They're not my favorite nuts, but they're
pretty high up there. I love them. I mean, you
can't eat a lot of them, um, because they're very,

(00:24):
very oily and very rich, and they are delicious, but
they're the kind of nut that And I find this
with a lot of nuts. For me, if you eat
too many of them, you get a little what do
I called nuts stomach? Yeah, get a little, get a
little nauseous, not nauseous, but just you know, a sour
belly you can't see straight. Yeah, it's no good. But

(00:45):
I do love macadamia nuts. But they are not nuts
like brazil nuts. They are seeds. Yes, And I was like, okay,
what's the difference between nuts and seeds. It's hard to explain.
Nuts are the fruit of the plant and they're surrounded
by a hard shell, and they actually contain seeds, and
seeds are an actual tiny version of the plant itself,

(01:06):
an embryo of the plant, and it's surrounded by the
seed coat which nourishes the plant's food for the planet
as it grows. That's right. And this one is chuck
full of good and like dinner party factoids and yes,
I'm using Lord factoids and chock full um. So another
one is you think, oh, macadamia nuts. Hawaii, of course

(01:29):
is where these things first came from. Sure, Like the
number one brand of macadamia nuts is Mounta Looa And
if that's not Hawaiian, I don't know what is. Yeah, well,
a lot of them do come from Hawaii for a
bunch of reasons. But they originated from our dear friends
down under in Australia, and they were brought over by
a man named William Purvis. He planted macadamia trees, which

(01:50):
are nice looking by the way they are, They're very pretty.
He planted them on the Big Island in one because
they were growing a lot of sugar back then. I
imagine they still grow a lot of sugar in Hawaii.
And he wanted a wind break, so he was like,
these trees look nice and they provide the wind break
that I need, so let me plant. Let me plant
these things. And uh, they don't produce nuts until they're

(02:12):
four or five years old. So to his delight, uh,
they bore a delicious uh, a delicious, yummy seed. So
I saw that he didn't actually, he wasn't around to
see that the seed could be eaten, or at the
very least to see it become popular. Relate to say
he died within four or five years. No, no, no,

(02:35):
but they didn't become popular until the twenties, about forty years,
that's what I mean. But surely they ate him right now.
I genuinely don't know. I don't know when they figured
it out, but I know that that some people, I
guess some people have figured it out by about the
turn of the century because the in in around nine

(02:55):
the entire global coffee market collapsed because Bolivia no Brazil,
ramped up its production and overproduced and so so supply
outstrip demand and the prices just collapsed. And that was
really bad for Hawaii because its economy was built in
large part on coffee too. So they set up the

(03:16):
Hawaiian Agricultural Experiment Station, which, if it wasn't affiliated with
the University of Hawaii back then, it is now, and
they they started saying, hey, you know what, the government
will subsidize your land if you start planning macadamia nuts,
And they actually didn't have very many takers at first.
Now there, you know, you'd get a five year tax exemption,

(03:37):
which is, you know, some pretty good dough. But I
think it just they didn't know that the world was
gonna go crazy for this stuff yet, so no one
was throwing their hat in the ring. When they did
find out that people like them, they really threw their
head in the ring. They I think it says here,
from uh nineteen thirty two to nineteen eight um production

(03:58):
went up from four twenty three acres to over a
thousand acres in Hawaii, which I don't think we mentioned
that the climate in Hawaii is just perfect for this stuff.
That's why they grow it there. Yeah, right, So like
the cultivars, which I didn't know this, but cultivar is
actually a combination of the words cultivated varieties. Did you
know that? Yeah? I thought we talked about that in

(04:19):
one of our episodes. Maybe we Maybe we did, and
it's just it didn't stick with me. But so a
cultivar is basically where we say, hey, we really like
this plant that's native to Australia. We're gonna really um
work it over and and and basically breed it into
a different version of itself. And that's what a cultivar is.
And with the cultivars that are um have been used

(04:42):
in Hawaii for you know, a century or so now, um,
they don't grow very well outside of Hawaii, which from
what I can tell, I mean, if you read between
the lines here, Hawaii has basically the market cornered on
macadamian nuts, which is good for Hawaii and for Hawaii's
mac damia nut farmers, but bad for the world because
the global demand for macadamia nuts just keeps growing and

(05:06):
it's not like the Hawaiian islands are growing anymore. So
that's it's actually created a bit of a problem market wise,
which we'll talk about in a little bit. All right,
we'll be right back, all right. So, if you've ever

(05:35):
been to the store, you're like, man, I want to
crush up some sweet macadamia nuts, and I want to
dredge my fish filet and that stuff and cook it
up in the oven. You're like McDonald's flay of fish. No, no, no, no, no,
have you ever done that? It's really good? I have.
As a matter of fact, there's a restaurant chain called

(05:56):
Roy's Hawaiian and they have a macadamia crusted that's really
really good. It's very delicious, very easy to do. But uh,
you might find that you're spending as much on your
macadamia nuts as you are your fish because it's expensive.
They consider it what's called the dessert nut, um, rather
than what's called a commodity crop, like any old other
dumb nut that you can just get tons and tons

(06:19):
of or seed because who can tell what's water anymore exactly.
But here's the deal. There's quite a few factors that
go into why. Um, you already mentioned that, you know,
they really have the market quartern in Hawaii, so that's
a big deal. Um. It takes seven years for a
nut tree to produce a crop, so that's obviously going
to drive up price some when you have to wait

(06:40):
a long time for an output. Yeah, and we said
like four to five earlier. It's it's somewhere between four
and seven. Yeah. Yeah, the person in the interview said
seven years. But yeah, between four and seven. He may
have been like inflating the numbers, you know, Yeah. Maybe.
So another thing is there are labor shortages in the
agricultural field in Hawaii, so you know they're having to

(07:02):
pay them more and pay them more benefits, so that's
driving up cost. They're invasive pests that hit macodaemias. They
felt it COCD cocid. I was gonna say, coxid, coxid.
That's what I'm going with. That's going to drive up
the price. And the most important thing, probably though, is
what you were alluding to, which is Hawaii's very expensive.

(07:23):
The land is really expensive, and because you have to
wait for to seven years to get a crop like there,
it's just not feasible to expand all these orchards, so
you're kind of like, just don't have a ton of growth. No,
that's right. So like the production and supply is basically
remaining steady while the demand goes up, which is how

(07:45):
you get macadamia nuts that go for twenty five dollars
a pound, and that's a lot of money. So really,
if you think about it, depending on the fish you're eating,
it's maybe twice as much as that fish that you're
you're using the macadamia nuts to crust. Where you think
I'm bringing some trash gelope in their garbage garbage fish,
I've heard telapia is referred to as the rats of

(08:05):
the sea. Have you ever heard that? Uh? No, but
I definitely um learned a lot over the years because
in my younger days, I thought like telapi was a
very fancy thing. Yeah, I I used to like it,
and then I heard it called the rats of the sea,
and I was like, I can't eat I can't eat
this anymore. Although seeing lobster called cockroaches of the sea

(08:27):
didn't do much to to thwart my love of lobster. Now,
I'll take a buttered mayonnaise cockroach roll any day. Delicious.
So our macadamia nuts. You know, they're super high in
calories and fat, But does that mean they're bad for you? No? No,
supposedly they're very very good for you. Um, especially if
they haven't been coated in delicious Maisie chocolate. Yeah, you

(08:49):
don't need that stuff. No, you do, you do, but
just don't count it as like healthy. Have you ever
had the Maisie chocolate covered Macadamian? No, it is delicious,
but I'm just saying a Macadamian to me, isn't something
you have to dress upus. Have you had the spam
dusted macadamia nuts. I think someone sentenced those, Yes, and
they're amazingly good. Yeah, But if you're if you're just

(09:14):
talking about there's a plain old natural roasted macadamia nuts,
it actually is pretty good for you. They're very high
in calories, but they also contain a lot of really
good fats, mono unsaturated fats, which are the kind that
actually lower your LDL cholesterol. They have a lot of carbs,
but they also have a lot of fiber. And so

(09:35):
anybody who's ever been on a keto diet like Atkins
or something like that can tell you it's the net
carbs that you care about. So you subject the grams
of fiber from the total grams of carbs, and you
end up with net carbs, and those are the ones
that you start counting. And apparently with macodaemia nuts, the
net carbs are actually fairly low. And because there are,
they're high in carbs below in net carbs, that means

(09:58):
the fiber in them, like plant liber is among the
best stuff you can eat. It keeps you so healthy,
it keeps your gut by microbiota happy and thriving. Um.
So apparently macadamia nuts are chock full of them, as
you would say. Yeah, they are also chock full of
vitamins and minerals um, manganese, diamond, copper, yeah, which copper

(10:21):
apparently um aids in in what some sort of transport
and absorption. Yeah, I can't remember what it was. It
says in't here and I was like, I didn't know
copper did that. God bless copper. I wonder people are
stealing it from houses iron absorption, okay, which is good. Yeah,
people do steal it, don't They from like a c

(10:42):
units or catalytic converter. Come on, sure that's somebody else's
catalytic converter. So chock full of despite being high in calories,
chock full of that good fiber, those good heart healthy
fats and proteins and vitamins and minerals um, you still
don't want to see it down and eat a bowl
full of them, because, like I said, they're very rich.

(11:03):
But they say, you know to it's a good filling nuts.
So if if you grab a handful between meals or something,
that's way better than eating potato chips or some you know,
processed ultraprocessed foods, right right, Yeah, and yeah, it'll keep
you full like between meals or something you just made
me think of, like sitting down and eating an actual
bowl full of just like he's just sick. Just start

(11:28):
growing up from overeating macadamia nuts. Can you imagine? No?
I talked about the oil content though they are seventy
oil and I did not know this. Here's another little
factoid to finish us off. You can throw a You
can throw any nut into water the toilet and see

(11:50):
if it floats. And if it's got se oil like
that macadamia nut, it's gonna float. Yeah. And if it doesn't,
apparently they just go flush yep, washed them down the toilet.
I don't think mecademia nuts are actually tested in a toilet.
Think so I'm hoping not. Well, let's say for macademia nuts, Charles,

(12:10):
I'm what about you, Jerry anything? M That's right? Well,
thank you for joining us on Short Stuff Short Stuff
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