Claude Bouchard Books

The other evening, Joanne and I were munching on unshelled peanuts when she candidly mentioned that peanuts were, in fact, not nuts, as nuts grow in trees while peanuts actually grow underground. Barring the fact that the word nut has been cleverly and not so subtly inserted into peanut, subsequent research supported my brilliant spouse's declaration about what a peanut isn't.

Images obtained through intensive research clearly demonstrating peanuts are not nuts.

As one would expect, this led to the obvious question, "If peanuts aren't nuts, what are they?" Applying my usual logic and analytical skills, I quickly presented a few plausible hypotheses which are as follows:

Since peanuts grow underground, much like the potato or water chestnut, perhaps the peanut is actually a tuber. This would explain why a peanut is sometimes referred to as a goober. Further support to this theory is the peanut as a snack food item, much like the potato chip. However, doubt arose when we considered how some people are allergic to peanuts whereas nobody is ever allergic to potato chips, unless they're fried in peanut oil, of course.

The subject of allergies opened up a new area of investigation such that people with peanut allergies often carry an epipen in case of emergency, while others who are allergic to shellfish are also never without an epipen.

Research photo of an actual epipen

However, when we compared a peanut to a shrimp and a lobster (see photos),

we soon determined a peanut certainly is not a shellfish. Really, would you eat a shrimp-butter and jelly sandwich? I think not.  Having scientifically eliminated both the tuber and shellfish hypotheses, we were left with the only other possibility which, I confess, has been publicly documented for years and was staring us in the face all along...

Peanuts are cartoon characters.

I write these blog posts for fun but my real writing goes into my novels: http://amzn.to/kgLCXI