Odd Food Metaphors

What makes one topic fruity, and another meaty? It's good to be beefy, but why not nutty?

An orange. A chicken leg. A walnut.

I'm not seeing it.

When I first noticed these odd food metaphors, I suspected a conspiracy. The meat industry, after all, seems a bit more entrenched than the fruit industry, not to mention the nut industry. I hoped a quick Internet search would confirm this, but alas, all I found was that the Online Etymology Dictionary confirmed my suspicions that these uses for meaty, fruity, and nutty all date from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Upon reflection, I realized I might be wrong about the conspiracy; after all, it's not very nice to milk someone for all they're worth. However, the first usage in this sense of exploit for profit is supposedly found much earlier, in 1526—back when most people had seen a cow get milked. And if you think about it, maybe this one makes sense.

There are many more food metaphors—the degradation of fruitcake, for instance, is perfectly just. But what's wrong with real fruit and nuts? The more I think about it, the less I can find a connection between a person who's slightly crazy (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, careful to distinguish this as American English) and an apple tree groaning under a harvest of edible gold.

Could it be that the cursed fruitcake came first, and dragged its innocent ingredients down its own avalanche of ruin? Apparently not, if we can trust that site: fruitcake is not attested as a term for lunatic until 1952, while fruit was being thrown at the odd person or eccentric as far back as 1910.

So how shall we reclaim the honor of the noble fruit and nut? Fruit, at least, yet retains some of its ancestral dignity; perhaps we can commit to emphasizing a plan's good fruit or a fruitful discussion, accompanying these phrases with expressive hand gestures. Nut, I fear, is a bit more far gone, though by finding more tough nuts to crack in everyday life, we might inspire in our companions at least a grudging respect.

And now I recall that the kernel, far from sharing the fate of its parent, has added glory to glory. This inner and usually edible part of a seed or grain or nut or fruit stone [emphasis added] has long been the core or central part of anything (since 1556), and now, of course, is enshrined at the heart of almost every functioning operating system.

Which is much more exciting than just being a word for the thing that grows into, um, all plant life.