I found reference material that asserts there are fifty-three edible nuts. I wasn’t actually looking for nuttiness, it found me (I need to make that clear). The list is interesting and I think we should discuss it, but I can tell you right off the bat that, while there may technically be fifty-three kinds of nuts you can eat, there are really only four that deliver any kind of eating satisfaction whatsoever. In order to provide clarification, I have included a photograph of three of the four (the pistachio refused to be photographed for this article).

Statistics tell us that the almond has jumped past the peanut as the world’s most popular nut. That’s crap. People are just kissing the almond’s ass because there are rumors swirling about that it’s a healthy snack. Just because people choke down a few handfuls of almonds before they drink their kale and seaweed smoothie doesn’t make the almond popular, it makes it medication, a supplement, a pill. On average, people take Tylenol three times a week and they have sex, on average, once per week. Does that make Tylenol more popular than sex?

Remember those ads that tried to get people to eat one can of almonds a week? Well, no one did. When a few knuckleheads did try it and their friends found out, those dudes started getting uninvited to stuff. Who wants to be associated with some almond-eating freak? Remember Almond Joy? Almond barf. If you got stuck with one in your Halloween bag, you would have traded it for anything, even raisins! After almond makers figured out that every citizen had one can of uneaten almonds in the very, very back of their pantry dating back to the early ’80s, they tried to sell us on how cute it was that almonds looked like little footballs. Humans have been picking almonds out of food and throwing them ever since.

If you put any nut other than a peanut in a candy bar it turns into a granola bar, and most Americans would just as soon eat wood shavings. When you go to a ballgame, do you know why they don’t have vendors in the aisles tossing fans bags of filberts? Because they suck. Ever bite into a chocolate chip cookie and get a big mouth full of walnuts? What do you do? That’s right, you spit it back onto the plate and curse the baker. Have you noticed that Planters has a mascot and his name is Mister Peanut? Do you know why he’s not called Mister Brazil Nut or Mister Hickory Nut or Mister Hazelnut? Well, it’s because peanuts are friendly and delicious and if you grind them up and mix them with a pound of sugar they make a delectable paste that makes every other food better. Shit, peanut butter makes celery tasty.

Just because it falls from a tree doesn’t mean you should eat it. If the only way you can digest a nut is to take it to a tropical island and then smother it in chocolate, it’s not edible … I’m talking to you macadamia nut. If you’re collected by a squirrel (acorns, pine nuts, etc.), you’re probably not a good candidate for the dinner table. There are four different kinds of chestnuts on the list of fifty-three including a Chinese and three kinds of walnuts including an English walnut and a black walnut which proves that, even in the nut world, everything’s racial. There’s a monkey nut and a paradise nut and a sandalwood nut and nuts I can’t pronounce from who knows where. I worry that with so many nuts on the list people will go out there and crack the shell of anything they encounter and think its health food.

I guess I should never have told you about the fifty-three nuts. It’s kind of a jacked-up list, I mean Beer Nuts aren’t on the list and I know they’re edible. I should not have gotten your hopes up about some sort of new nut universe, especially since you should only really be eating peanuts and their crescent-shaped cousin the cashew. (You can eat sunflower seeds and pistachios, and I will and do eat them, but the reward is meager and the only reason they’re among the edible four is that they represent a type of sport, that is, a kind of ongoing contest to see if you can liberate them from their shell.)

I know this ends up sounding personal, that maybe I’m taking things too seriously and to that, all I can say is, yes, I take my nuts seriously.