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 !

Perhaps tapioca can be added for cassava..

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.

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.

Seconded

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.

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'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

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. :-(

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

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.

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.