World's Most Grown Crops

Could oil palm be accepted for palm oil? Carrots and turnips have nothing in common, I don't understand why they are grouped here... (carrots are apiaceae and turnips are brassicaceae).

Palm could also work for coconut, oil palm is more specific. If you accept the more general term, why not the more exact one as well?

Agreed. I typed in "palm", didn't get it and moved on. None of the other vegetables that make oils are that specific (presumably because they're also used for things other than oil), so I wasn't expecting that one to be.

yeah why not paper or lumber

and apples, pears and oranges !

Maybe because cotton is considered more 'croppy' than trees.

Perhaps tapioca can be added for cassava..

Peanuts is on the list - near the bottom of the second column !

Was recently updated, probably added peanuts and removed water buffalo milk.

Kinda terrifying that even with all the alternative sweeteners like corn syrup used today, sugar cane is still the world's most produced crop, and it's not a close race.

I also think it is due to the measuring. For sugarcane, basically the whole plant is harvested, but the final product (refined sugar) only has a fraction of that weight. In case of apples for example, only the fruits are harvested, but now, the final product has the same weight.

No.

Quizmaster, this is a very political comment and I for one am offended. While I think you are mostly correct (except that sugar isn't the #1 cause of reduced life expectancy), this is very clearly a matter of politics and not science. At least you didn't mention f*** m***s when you brought up Covid, that would have made my head explode with partisan rage.

What are you on about?? The list of chronic diseases either caused or exacerbated by excess sugar is massive, and in the US at least, nearly all mass produced food has added sugar or HFCS. Not sure what is political about that?

I think jetpunkers should not start to push their own agendas on this site. There are other web-sites that you can join to complain about the world problems.

Is f*** m***s meant to mean 'fake masks'?

I think Quizmaster is right and I don't think the comment was meant to be political, but it's simplistic. If you live in a developed country, or as a middle class/rich person in many developing countries, processed food is pretty much impossible to avoid. It's probably next to impossible for someone to cut out *all* the added sugar they consume on a daily basis, just because of a lack of options. It's something that can only really change if the government/food industry takes action, and I doubt that's anything that will happen soon.

Quizmaster deleted a criticism I made of his questionable claims regarding vitamin D in connection to this pandemic because apparently it was too political, as I alluded to the thing Jack mentioned. I never mentioned government action, but apparently this is a controversial issue in the United States so it should never be mentioned. And now QM is criticising an actual government spending policy (inherently political) in a comparison that in my view is flawed, but I'm unsure what response I could make to this that would be apolitical by his standards. I wouldn't mind a rule against political comments if it could be applied fairly and came with a commitment from the site to cover political or political-adjacent topics only in an unbiased way, but neither of these seems to be happening.

They are both bad for you when consumed in excess...It is definitely a "first world problem" though as in developing countries something else (war, famine, pathogens etc)has a higher probability of getting you first

No sweet pepper, no lemons, no mushrooms, no coffee, no tea, no cacao?! o0

I'm guessing for tea & cacao the final product is more concentrated so the production tonnage is lower than for a lot of fruits.

^Same. Also surprised at the lack of tobacco. I think the fact that those things are smaller/less massive individually could also be a factor. 1,000 cucumbers weighs a lot more than 1,000 tea leaves.

Yes I wonder. Although speaking for myself, I'm sure I get through a greater weight of coffee bean per week than I do of many of the things on this list. Perhaps it's just me.

Yep. I tried coffee, tea and tobacco and was surprised they were not on the list.

Seconded

Two years on, still not allowed.

As a matter of interest QM, why is tobacco not on the list? Is it the same as Tea/coffee and excluded because of the processing?

Canola (Canadian oil) is a newer, improved type of rapeseed oil which had some of the bad things in rapeseed bred out of it. I remember when it first came out in the '70s it was touted as the newest, greatest "health" food. So would the two really be the same thing? Perhaps it's labeled differently across the pond.

Fun fact, Canola is named as such because it was developed in a Canadian university. It is basically a shortened version of Canada oil.

Always fun to see this quiz updated with the new year! In line with accepting palm, soy, chili and sunflower, please accept sugar sans cane.

Please?

I would say no. There are several sugar crops- cane, beet and to an extent corn are grown for that and many others on the list are good sources of it.

I would parry thusly: while there are other crops grown for sugar, like beets, sugar cane is the most iconic, and the one most people think of when they think of a crop grown for sugar. I'm still holding out hope that sugar will be accepted for sugar cane one of these years :)

Yeah I agree with the above commenter that sugar is a product rather than a crop; the crop is sugarcane or sugar beet.

I'm very surprised that coffee, cocoa, peanuts and tobacco are not on this list.

Same. But then I remembered that it's by weight, and that would explain tea and tobacco for sure. As for the others, they are still either not that heavy or their production not high enough to make the list. Cocoa is heavy but depends on whether they measure the whole fruit or just the seeds, which is more likely.

I think a lot of these fruits show up over coffee beans because they do this by weight and fruits naturally are full of water. Coffee beans by themselves aren't that heavy but if you calculated the weight of all the coffee produced from them it would be a lot more.

How about allowing sugar for sugar cane?

Could potato be accepted for sweet potato?

Like York and New York are the same place.

sweet potato would be a yam if I am not mistaken

Not quite so simple. Sweet Potato and Yam are botanically different, but often used interchangeably linguistically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato

How could I have missed garlic and onion?

I got several of the others by remembering what the most common food allergies are to.

I was surprised not to see cacao, coffee or smokable plants

If cauliflower and cabbage are lumped together, you could also add cabbage to the group, and a few that don't make the list on their own (e.g. kale and Brussels sprouts). They're different cultivar groups of the same species, Brassica oleracea. Turnip is actually a variant of a closely related species, Brassica rapa, while carrots are from the Apiaceae family, a completely different branch of the higher plants, so it makes no sense to lump carrots and turnip together as a single answer.

I think there is an error in peanuts not being on the list.

I understand yam and sweet potato. They are two completely different things, but carrot and turnip are also different. Sorghum and millet are much more closely related than those two, and I find it difficult to believe there are more green beans raised than dried beans such as pinto, black, navy, etc.

My grandmother used to grow a sweet potato variety called Yellow Yam so you are correct that there are varieties of sweet potato called yam, but no matter what we call them, in reality as I stated previously, they are two different plants. I've never seen a true yam in US grocery stores.

Yams are a West African vegetable. Due to slavery, the New World vegetable, sweet potato, was given the moniker 'yam' because it was the closest thing the enslaved West Africans saw to their former staple crop.

Just see wiki.

Two things I see missing:

Grapefruit, which i belive is around 85 mtons, and Coffee Plants

Millet? Sorghum? Never heard of it. Gonna look them up now.

Ah, turns out I did think of millet in my own language. I was allready thinking, I dont know all the english names for the grains, or at least couldnt come up with all. And this one I was pretty sure I didnt know the english term for. (Also thought of the dutch name for barley, which is very similar as the one for millet. Gerst and gierst)

So apparently money really doesn't grow on trees. :-(

There was no cash cow on the domesticated animals quiz either.

Thought vanilla, cocoa, peanut, tobacco, coffee, cherry, rasberry, and blackberry would be here

Not much vanilla is necessary to flavor a food (the reason there are no spices in this quiz). And most vanilla flavor is artificial, because real vanilla is pretty expensive.

Three that are definitely missed - Peanut, Hemp and Poppy

It's by weight, not value

What is a melon? There are different types of melons, sure, like watermelons, rockmelons and honeydews, but melon....?

I think Cucumis melo or 'musk melon', a species which contains cantaloupes and honeydews (among others), but not watermelons, for example.

Could this answer at least accept "cantaloupe" or "honeydew" as type-ins? I got watermelon and then tried cantaloupe, and when it wasn't accepted, I assumed there must be no more melons on the list.

This source must have been really weird. It groups together carrots and turnips, but not bananas and plantains? Sure, they're different species, but they are in the same Genus. Meanwhile, carrots and turnips aren't even in the same family.

Agree. After I typed "Melon" and it got accepted, I didn't think that "Watermelon" would be a separate category!

When you remember to type Plantains, Sorghum and Cassava, but forget Onions and Garlic, that's when you know you've spent too much time on Jetpunk.

All the other quizzers who didn't get it tried "sugar" but it wasn't accepted. I think they're sending a message to the quiz maker :)

The Beatles misled me with all that "Strawberry Fields Forever" talk.

Why are carrot and turnip grouped together? They are two very differnt things.

The data was most likely collected that way.

Why can't simply "sugar" be accepted for sugar cane?

Because the quiz maker decided that sugar beet and sugar cane needed to be separate entries. Despite several other pairings of certain crops.

It's FAOSTAT that came up with the distinctions/pairings, not the quizmaker

@PeregrineFalcon However tis not the same issue as accepting a type-in, so for example accepting "sugar" for sugarcane.

The thought of 26 million Tonnes of Broccoli ........... yuuuuuk

Haha. It's lovely very lightly steamed with melted butter or a drizzle of olive oil, freshly ground pepper, salt and a splash of fresh lemon juice. Promise.

It's good plain

It's great roasted with a little olive oil & seasoning, too!

You misspelled "yum"

China produces a lot of pears, 2/3 of the total

Interesting Facts #229

In South Korea, it is a common belief that people can die if they sleep in a closed room with an electric fan running.

Have you ever slept in a closed room with an electric fan running?

Yes, but not in South Korea.

please accept sugar for sugar cane

for some reason upon starting this quiz I forgot about the existence of all fruits and vegetables

Forgot maize exists which tells me it’s time for bed

Really surprised that lentils aren't on the list - seems like the weight argument shouldn't really apply.

Yes, I was surprised by this as well!

I think they must have used a bunch of very narrow categories for different kinds of dry legume, otherwise I'd really expect them to be here.

Different vegetables entirely, though as others have pointed out in North America people colloquially refer to an orange variety of the sweet potato as a yam.

Any chance you can accept mandarin for tangerine? Tangerines are a type of mandarin.

I typed mandarin but it didn't work

What about "hay"?

Tobacco? coffee ? tea ?

I'm surprised there's not more beans on here. I'm curious what the statistics are for certain other crops like tea, coffee, cacao, tobacco, khat, and coca. Also I really wonder if lumber is actually a crop, because it meets the definition of a crop as "a plant that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or subsistence."

who calls corn maize?

"Corn" only really means maize if you live in North America, I think (as does the Collins Dictionary). In Britain the proper terms are maize when it's growing in the field and sweetcorn when it's on your plate - except for corn on the cob, confusingly. That said, quite a lot of people do follow the American usage.

You must accept «batat(a)»…

Pls accept yam for sweet potato

please accept Kumara for sweet potato.

Quizmaster, is it possible to post a link to the source? I'm curious about the rankings and the methodology, but I wasn't able to find the info when I did a brief search on FAOSTAT.

Not a complaint about the quiz, but about the source- alfalfa absolutely belongs here. I couldn't find 2019 data specifically, but nearby years were in the 200 million ton range, which clearly qualifies for the list.

I could sort of understand if this was only counting crops for "human consumption", but the significant majority of corn grown is used for animal feed (or biofuel), same as alfalfa. I just can't see a reason why it wouldn't be on the list.