Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables

Some fiction will introduce similar or strange fruits and vegetables, often the object of a search and/or an important ingredient in something. They tend to have odd abilities, and properties that don't occur in real life.

It should be noted that there are a fair number of real fruits and vegetables that can qualify as very strange, unusual, and exotic. (For example: the Durian, the Buddha's Hand, or the Miracle Fruit.) But of course, they have a slim chance of showing up in fiction due to Small Reference Pools, so you get fictional ones instead.

See also Magic Mushroom, Healing Herb, and Multipurpose Monocultured Crop. Compare Fantastic Livestock. Has overlap with Weird World, Weird Food.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: The dungeon is a magical ecosystem with its own food web, including plants.
  • Different types of giant Man-Eating Plant produce fruit to lure in their prey; Laios' group retrieves some of the fruit and makes it into a tart. A footnote mentions that different kinds of plants produce different fruit: the digestive types' are juicy and sweet, while the fertilizer types' are dense and full-flavored.
  • Pollinated dryad flowers eventually turn into pumpkin-like fruits with human faces on them. Laios is appropriately excited to eat them and Marcille is equally and appropriately freaked out. The flower buds are also edible but spoil quickly unless pickled.
  • Mandrakes can be cooked like root vegetables and are rich in natural Mana, though they unleash a deadly scream when first picked.
• Digimon Frontier has meat apples, which have to be cooked to be edible.
• Dragon Ball has Senzus^note "Sage Beans", which can instantly satisfy the appetite of even the biggest eaters and will recover the stamina of those who eat them, as well as immediately heal all injuries.
  • Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!! introduces Chichi's grateful radish, a seed that can spout into hand-sized vegetables overnight but will root itself in the ground so hard regular humans can't even remove the smallest sprouts, and they can grow their roots to extend to the base of a mountain.
• Mashle: Magic and Muscles: Mandragoras are screaming vegetables that becomes a universal ingredient in potions should they be silenced. Typically magic is used to silence the plants, but Mash's lack of magic causes the Mandragora he is attempting to silence to become erratic and grow larger. Mashle subdues it by slapping it into unconsciousness and becoming silent.
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Tohru uses several bizarre fruits and vegetables from the other world when trying to make the perfect omelette rice. She also gets a hold of a fruit that sprouts teeth when bitten into (and in the anime, tries to kiss people) during a cook-off with Kobayashi.
• One Piece: the devil fruits that give eaters superpowers, with the side effect of removing the ability to swim. They each have a fairly distinctive look and universally taste incredibly foul.
• Rosario + Vampire: the monster Durian in Capu 2.
• One chapter of Sgt. Frog features Giroro and his brother Garuru butting heads with a giant killer space yam.
• Not used for laughs in the manga Sugar Dark where one of a series of monstrously sized, practically unstoppable undead Eldritch Abomination called "The Dark" had been buried under a tree, tainting and mutating its growing fruits with its essence. The adorable, yet horribly woobieish Moe, Meria, ate one of the fruits of the tree and absorbed its power, turning her into a creature with Resurrective Immortality whom members of the Masquerade use to lure the "The Dark" into killing and torturing her in various ways before they become incapacitated by the upcoming sunlight and buried into the ground, which is the only way of sealing them off from harming humanity.
• Those Who Hunt Elves has nuts that can be pressed for diesel fuel, which the isekai'd Japanese high school student main characters use to run their Sherman Tank, at least until it gets possessed by a cat's ghost and gains a bottomless fuel tank to match the magazine.
• In Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, the travelers (all from different worlds), are arguing in a marketplace over what a particular fruit is. Said fruit looks like an apple, but when someone begins describing an apple, someone else says, "isn't that a raki seed?", which sets off another character declaring what his perception of an apple is. Not surprisingly, the fruit stand owner tersely asks them if they want to buy the fruit, or just argue over it, prompting Mokona to respond, "Want it!", and swallowing the apple, ending the discussion.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Flying Island: The Sky Adventure episode 5 features weather fruits which are shot out of cannons to form different weather patterns in the sky. Small weather fruits are used for cooling, medium weather fruits are used for cleaning, and large weather fruits are used for controlling the weather.

Comic Books

• The Arrival: Even the everyday food of the unnamed city is strange; instead of regular foodstuffs that he expected, the protagonist has to learn how to recognize and prepare a variety of bizarre, elaborately contorted fruits and vegetables.
• The DCU: Gingold, a rare tropical fruit from the Yucatan. It was the basis for the formula that gave Ralph Dibny (the Elongated Man) his stretching abilities.
• Spirou & Fantasio has a whole valley filled with fantastic fruits and vegetables. They all look horrible (i.e., purple-brown skull-shaped peaches) but are actually delicious.
• What If?: A one-panel gag shows a scenario in which the Fantastic Four's powers were instead given to bananas.

Fairy Tales

• In many variants of tale type ATU 425A, "The Animal (Monster) as Bridegroom" (a subtype that pertains to the tale type ATU 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband", to which Cupid And Psyche belongs), after the heroine loses her enchanted/cursed husband, she travels to the houses of three old women or witches, where she is given three nuts (e.g., generic nuts, walnuts, almond nuts, hazelnuts). The heroine reaches the kingdom where her husband is, where he is also to be married to another woman, and cracks open the nuts to produce wonderful objects she uses to bribe a false bride for three nights with her husband. Depending on the tale, the nuts may produce splendid dresses, apparatuses related to spinning (e.g., a reel or a loom), or more extravagant objects, like a golden carriage.
• In many variants of the tale type ATU 550, "Bird, Horse, and Princess" (of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index), the story begins with a king that has a tree of lustrous golden apples in the garden that are stolen every night by a luminous golden bird. The apples apparently do nothing the context of the tale, save serving as a MacGuffin to start the hero's quest for the titular bird, horse and princess. Examples include German The Golden Bird and Russian Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf.
• In East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian) variants of tale type ATU 551, "The Water of Life" (named "Rejuvenating Apples" or "Apples of Youth" in the East Slavic Index), the hero, the king's third son, searches for the titular apples to heal his father.
• The Love of Three Oranges: The premise of the tale and its variants is that the hero searches for fruits that release adult maidens for him to marry. More often than not, the fruits are citrus fruits, which include citrons, lemons, oranges, bitter oranges and bergamots. Alternatively, the hero may find apples, pumpkins, cucumbers, and even reeds.
• In fairy tales classified as tale type ATU 566, "The Three Magic Objects and the Wonderful Fruits (Fortunatus)" (of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index), the hero gains three magical objects that are stolen by a princess. In revenge, he finds some fruits that can make horns grow on a person's head and uses them on her. Depending on the variant, the fruits may be figs or apples:
  • Fortunatus and His Purse.
  • The Magic Apples (Norway).

Fan Works

• Family of the Shield has Naofumi Iwatani and his daughter Teal use their Green Thumb abilities on Bioplant Seeds in order to create a myriad of different fast-growing nutritious fruits and vegetables from them ranging from the ordinary Fruit Bushes used in Lerno Village, the Potato-like "Netting Roots" that will just keep growing downwards unless planted in a box container or grown on a cliffside, and the Apple-like "Swirlers" that switches between orange and red which determines whether the Swirler would be Sweet or Sour when picked.
• Star Wars: Galactic Folklore and Mythology: The fallfruits from Ewok myth are coconut-like fruits said to be sapient, and to deliberately drop on the heads of unsuspecting passers-by.

Films — Animated

• In The Croods, there's a plant that resembles giant corncobs sprouting out of the ground. When Granny sets the grass near it on fire, the giant kernels start to pop from the heat, and its cobs shoot up into the sky like a Gas-Cylinder Rocket before exploding like fireworks.
• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Amazing Pleasant Goat, the Glee-Gulu, a large pear-shaped fruit, is used in the Dragon Slayer Contest, with those in the contest expected to lift it. It's explained that the fruit is sacred, grows on its tree once every one thousand years, and has a name that means "very heavy" in prehistoric goat language.
• Treasure Planet had purple lemons that crunch like apples. They were called Purps.

Films — Live-Action

• The shuura fruit appears in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. It is more an example of Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp", since it's basically a pear.
• The titular fruits of Tintin and the Blue Oranges are genetically-modified oranges which are blue, glow in the dark, and most importantly, can be grown even in the harsh desert environment. They're highly sought-after by villains due to the economic implications such a crop carries, but in their current state, they have an awful bitter and salty taste, making them inedible.
• In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the snozzberries taste like snozzberries! Subverted in that there are no actual snozzberries, just depictions of them on wallpaper.

Literature

• Akata Witch: Plants touched by the Spirit World are popular for cooking in Leopard Person Magical Society. "Tainted peppers" are a favourite for soup, despite their tendency to explode or Curse the eater if prepared improperly.
• The BFG: Snozzcumbers, the only food that grows in Giant Country, are so disgusting the giants prefer to eat children instead, with the exception of the eponymous Big Friendly Giant who puts up with the foul taste. Quentin Blake's illustrations resemble the real-life bitter gourd.
• The Bible describes two fruit trees existing in the centre of the Garden of Eden, called the 'Tree of Life' and the 'Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil'. In the story of Adam and Eve, eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is what gets the first humans kicked out of the garden, may have been the origin of humanity's tendency towards sin, and also causes Adam and Eve to develop a nudity taboo. The fruit of the Tree of Life, meanwhile, apparently extends the life of anyone who eats it, so after humanity falls to sin God puts guards in the garden to prevent any humans getting to the tree and gaining the means to live forever.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Willy Wonka offhandedly mentions snozzberry-flavoured candy during his tour of his fantastical factory, much to his visitors' confusion. He doesn't explain or elaborate.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The Magician's Nephew:
    • A magical garden has a tree with silver apples — a direct reference to the Tree of Knowledge from The Bible. One apple acts as a Panacea that cures Digory's mother's otherwise fatal illness.
    • Digory and Polly plant a toffee in Narnian soil while the world is still fresh from its creation; it grows into a tree with candy-like fruit.
  • In The Silver Chair, it turns out that far Beneath the Earth in Narnia, precious metals and gems are living plants that produce fruit.
  • The Last Battle: The Physical Heaven has a tree whose fruit, in true C.S. Lewis style, can only be described by saying how much better it is than everything that exists in the real world. It's implied that this is some of the fruit from the Garden in The Magician's Nephew, only now the characters eating it are both dead and in the kingdom of Aslan, so they get the full bore of it.
• Discworld
  • The wahoonie, a foul-smelling, earwax-colored root vegetable that can grow up to twenty feet in length. Ankh-Morpork is known as the Big Wahoonie, though the narration claims that not even the wahoonie smells that bad.
  • A whole range of these spontaneously evolved on Mono Island in The Last Continent, in a frantic effort to prove useful enough to the departing wizards that they'd take their seeds off the isle (and away from the crackpot God of Evolution). Although there's no specific scene of them encountering a "pencil bush", it's mentioned in Hogfather that pencils are grown, not made, on Discworld, so it's possible that one such species did successfully spread to other islands.
  • The Sto Plains are known for their cabbages. The Discworld Almanack features a Long List of cabbage varieties, all of which are fictional and some of which are fantastic, being known to move around, explode, turn to stone, or do something else that makes you wonder why people don't just grow the ones you can actually eat.
  • The legendary witch Granny Weatherwax keeps a garden of "...herbs" (ellipsis and italics mandatory) for medicine and other witchcraft. It's ambiguous how much of their magic is intrinsic and how much is from the knowledge that they are "...herbs" from a witch's garden, but the plants do turn to watch passers-by.
• Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Book 3 (Calling On Dragons) has the travelers stop near a farm (run by a man named MacDonald), who's currently only growing fruits and vegetables of this type — or in some cases, normal-looking ones that replicate the effects of plants from classic fairy tale settings. These include peas that are hard as a rock to scatter on the floor and expose visiting princesses disguised as men (or to stick under their mattress to expose the ones disguised as peasants, as in the story of The Princess and the Pea), straw designed to be spun into gold, four kinds of grain that come from the same plant so it's harvested premixed (for people who want to test someone by making them sort out the different kinds), beans that jump or grow giant stalks, apples in several varieties of poisoned or gold, extra large pumpkins for turning into coaches, and walnuts with almost anything inside.
• European Folk and Fairy Tales:
  • In Cinder-Maid, the hazel tree on Cinder-Maid's mother's grave yields nuts that contain the dresses inside.
  • In The Three Soldiers, the sergeant finds a fig tree: black figs make horns grow on one's head, and the white ones make the horns fall.^note The magic horn-growing fruits is a feature of Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type ATU 566, "The Three Magic Objects and the Wonderful Fruits (Fortunatus)".
• In the Gentleman Bastard series, alchemists produce a variety of these for various practical and hedonistic purposes, like an orange tree whose fruit is naturally infused with brandy.
• Harry Potter has several mentioned in passing, usually as potion ingredients: shrivelfigs, gurdyroots, and dirigible plums (which Luna wears as earrings).
• InCryptid has screaming yams, grown by the gorgon community. Sarah and her friends also encounter various strange vegetables in Another Dimension, which are so alien that she can only describe them by saying what they're not.
• It's Kirby Time: The heart fruit, which is the objective of Kirby's quest in Take Courage, is said to fill its eater's heart with courage.
• Land of Oz featured a lot of these—lunch pails growing on trees featured in Ozma of Oz
• The Queen's Museum and Other Fanciful Tales by Frank Stockton: the story "Christmas Before Last" has the Fruit of the Fragile Palm. It's similar to a coconut, but the inside is so delicious that it's worth as much as diamonds or pearls.
• In The Saga Of Ragnar Lothbrok, Heimir feeds baby Aslaug with a "wine-leek" (vinlauk). This is apparently some kind of highly nutritious super-vegetable which provides a complete and balanced diet to small children.
  It was the nature of this leek that a man could live long even though he had no other food.
• The Silmarillion recounts how, in Middle Earth, the Sun originated as a Fantastic Fruit.
• So This is Ever After: Heart's Truth is a plant with the property that when it's pollen affects someone they will tell the truth of their heart.
• Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
  • Zalkatian Clamdas, Betazoid Hilrep, Horvas, Andorian Vithi, many, many more.
  • Star Trek: Titan - Taking Wing speaks of kheh, a Romulan grain.
• The Stormlight Archive takes place on the planet Roshar, a world where massive, regular destructive storms known as "highstorms" blow across the main continent. The flora on Roshar has evolved into bizarre shapes, with much of it being hardened to withstand the storms or mobile enough to hide in crevices or flatten against the ground. The resulting fruits, vegetables, and grains that people eat are equally odd, like lavis grain, which is a corn-like food that grows in enormous polyps on hillsides that have to be broken open at harvesting time.
• Dayig fruit, from Summers at Castle Auburn. The main character's uncle uses it to pose a sort of personality test to a hunting party: The fruit is absolutely delicious but full of tiny, poisonous seeds. Would you risk trying it? Later subverted: the seeds aren't poisonous at all, and he was just playing mind games with the group.
• Villains by Necessity: Kaylana gets a number of plants gathered as a gift from Sam which have magical properties and together she used for a Time Stop spell at a crucial time.
• There's a lot of these in Xanth, mostly having properties derived from bad puns (explosive cherry bombs, etc). Weaponized by one character whose magic talent is conjuring fruit.

Live-Action TV

• Gilligan's Island: In the episode with the radioactive vegetable seeds, the castaways plant them, then are surprised at the shapes of the vegetables when they harvest them, including udder-shaped carrots, pretzel-shaped beans, and corn rings.
• In Kamen Rider Gaim, the fruits of the otherworldly Helheim Forest. They're supernaturally tempting, and the Yggdrasill Corporation has developed Driver belts so that when people wearing Drivers pick the fruit, it turns into something called a Lockseed which then has an image of a mundane Earth fruit on it. Lockseeds can then be used with a Driver to give a person powerful armor based on the fruit it shows. Also related are Invase, creatures of Helheim that eat its fruit, that can be summoned and controlled by Lockseeds but go One-Winged Angel if they eat one of those. It turns out that the Helheim plant is an extremely aggressive invasive species; it sprouts up immediately where any spores land and any non-Invase that eats its fruit is immediately mutated into an Invase, which then carries its seeds and can attack and infect other living beings. It's to the point that the forest can qualify as an Eldritch Location, and it's already overtaken at least one alien world.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The alfirin seeds are used in medicine by Elves and the cunning women among Men.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had the Singing Squash, which was, well, a squash that sings. A very rare vegetable that Zordon discovered in his early years (when he was still humanoid) it only grows in another dimension. The extract of it was needed to cure a curse of brainwashing.
• Stargate SG-1: Invoked offscreen in the Show Within a Show Wormhole X-Treme, when Martin Lloyd tells a prop guy to "get some kiwis and spray-paint them green" for a scene, instead of using apples.
  Prop Guy: So, now the scene reads, "Colonel Danning walks into the orchard, says 'How like Eden this world is', and bites into a painted kiwi."
• Star Trek: Voyager: Neelix introduces the Voyager crew to the nutritious but awful-tasting leola root. They never quite forgive him for that.
• Star Trek: Picard: In "Maps and Legends", a Utopia Planitia employee complains about the space pineapples in her replicated meal, so the fruit in question is not from Earth, and it presumably has a similar appearance and/or taste to pineapples.

Mythology

• The fruit of the lotus tree in Greek Mythology, which caused both sleepiness and addiction. (The tree is the Trope Namer for the Lotus-Eater Machine, by the way.)
• The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which was believed to grow sheep as its fruit; medieval Europeans couldn't conceive of any other way for cotton to exist.
• Chinese Mythology has many stories that feature the Peaches of Immortality, which, as their name suggests, grant immortality to those who eat it. At one point, Sun Wukong was given the title of "Protector of the Peaches", but it was like letting a cat guard a canary...
• Similarly, in Norse Mythology, the goddess Iðunn grew apples which acted as a Fountain of Youth for the gods. (The effect wasn't permanent; one story tells of a clever jotun who stole the apples, so the gods grew old. They made Loki go retrieve them.)
• Medieval bestiaries contain many bizarre "facts" about both real and mythological animals. One bestiary has the "Barnacle Goose," a bird that grows from a tree hanging by its beak, and dies when it falls off if it lands on the ground instead of water. As absurd as it sounds, it was mostly perpetuated so people had an excuse to eat geese during fast days.
• In the Caucasian Nart Sagas there is a golden tree, with red-and-white apples that ripen over a single day. If a barren woman takes a bite of the white side, she will be blessed with a white-haired daughter; if she takes a bite of the red side, she will be blessed with a white-haired son. Once a year, there is also a special apple that grows at the very top of the tree, rounder and larger than the others, that possesses powers of healing and immortality.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost features Goblin Fruits, fruits that grow only in the Hedge. The fruits range in appearance from "like typical fruit, only in slightly off colors" to "resembling everything from roughly-carved human heads to icicles to ovaries." Most of them have a beneficial effect on changeling metabolism, allowing them to heal damage, but a good number of the fruits have side effects, such as increased alertness, unceasing hunger, guaranteed fertility, or the temporary ability to understand any spoken language.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The death's head tree's fruit resembles heads (those of the bodies the tree has eaten) that can spit seeds like bullets.
  • Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, a 5E sourcebook, has a chapter on unusual and otherworldly phenomena that includes a description of primal fruit, grown from plants rooted in areas rich in primal magic or blessed by divine influence. These fruit can be told from normal ones by traits such as odd colors or faint sparkling or luminescence, and if eaten (including after cooking or juicing) can produce a number of effects, such as healing their eater or providing them with boosted strength or vitality, providing resistance from harmful magic, or providing temporary telepathy.
• Scarred Lands:
  • Used to Squickiest effect in the monster list "Dark Menagerie". Gaurak the Glutton, one of the titans sealed into the land of Scarn by the gods, offers his most devoted followers tainted greasy melons that turn them into disgusting, greasy folds of fat hardly able to walk and swarming with lard worms that eat anything unlucky enough to suffocate in their folds.
  • A plant that was tainted among a corrupted forest by one of the titan's blood after it was felled by the gods is a gnarled tree covered in fruits with tormented faces on them that corrupts any creature that eats it, making the unfortunate victim willing to defend the tree with their lives. Some particularly vile cults and evil worshipers willingly corrupt themselves by drinking its juice.
• Traveller: In a side story in Intersteller Wars, one spacer visits a planet that is unique as a garden world that can instantly evolve its life to fit any new change. The spacer eats a local fruit and finds it delicious but shocks a local farmer who told him it had been poisonous the day before.

Toys

• BIONICLE has Bula (berries that restore energy), Madu (explosive coconuts), and Thornax (spiky, sometimes explosive, fruit used as Edible Ammunition).

Video Games

• The Crash Bandicoot franchise has Wumpa fruit, Crash's Trademark Favourite Food. They appear to be a cross between apples, peaches, and mangoes and have purple (or yellow) juice. In most games, collecting 100 of them will grant Crash an extra life, and in others, they refill his health bar. Even more bizarrely, they're also used by Crash as pretty painful Edible Ammunition.
• Dwarf Fortress has a wide selection of edible plants, and while 'garden' and 'crop' plants are mundane, 'standard' ones are often not.
  • The ones players will get most experience with are underground crops, staples of dwarven farming that are available for embark: Plump helmets (a purple mushroom), cave wheat, pig tail (used for thread), sweet pods (dwarven equivalent to sugarcane), dimple cups (make a blue dye), and quarry bushes (which have gray leaves and seeds called rock nuts).
  • Some crops are only found in areas of certain alignments; sun berries (which produce the best alcohol in the game) in Good areas, Sliver Barbs (black dye) in Evil biomes, and Whip Vines (high-value flour) in savage lands.
  • Aside from crops, there's Valley Herbs and Kobold Bulbs, which can only be obtained by plant gathering. They can be used to produce incredibly valuable extracts for trading- Valley Herbs make Golden Salve, and kobold bulbs make Gnomeblight.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind, given its significant Earth Drift compared to the rest of the series, has numerous examples which are native to Vvardenfell and are cultivated by the Dunmer. For example, Comberries are bitter-sour berries used to make alcohol. Ash Yams are root vegetable similar to potatoes with a very distinctive odor. Saltrice is a white/gray stalk vegetable said to be very "tasty and nutritious". Muck is a fibrous slime harvested from fungus-like "muckspunge" plants that is mildly toxic, but if properly prepared, can be used to cure common diseases. Marshmerrow is a leafy green with modest healing properties. Trama Root is a bitter-tasting shrub root used to brew tea. Numerous other examples are found throughout the game as well.
  • Oblivion: Everything found in the Shivering Isles expansion, with a large side order of Fungus Humongous.
  • Skyrim: While most of the fruits and vegetables in Skyrim are quite close to their real-world counterpart (potatoes, wheat, cabbage, apples, and so on) there is also snowberries, which grow exclusively in extreme cold environments where few other edible plants can live. They are useful for crafting potions to resist different types of magic damage and are an ingredient in several pastries that the player can make.
• Fallout: The fruit that most people eat is a mutant plant called a mutfruit, which is descended from apples. The Fallout 3 DLC Point Lookout features the Punga fruit, which the local tribals cultivate, worship, and trade for its anti-radiation properties.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Gysahl Greens, which Chocobos eat. In Final Fantasy XII, it's implied that humans can safely eat them, too.
  • Final Fantasy XII has cactus fruit and an otherwise-undefined undefined "succulent fruit" as loot.
  • Final Fantasy VII and its spinoffs have the Banora White or Dumbapple fruit which looks like an apple but is purple and has no growing season.
• I Wanna Be the Guy: Delicious Fruit, which, like everything else, try to kill you. They're more like giant cherries, really. And people do apparently eat them, although they have to be harvested with sticks from a distance and boiled three times to remove the poison.
• Kingdom Hearts has the star-shaped Paopu fruit, which supposedly links the destinies of those who share one.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: Link can harvest seeds from magical trees that, when cracked open, cause effects such as sparking fires, luring monsters, increasing Link's speed and creating whirlwinds.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • A variety of wild forage, including various kinds of fruit, herbs, flowers, and mushrooms, provide buffs when cooked into food that can include instantly restoring stamina, making Link stronger or stealthier, or making him resistant to intense cold, burning heat, and electricity.
    • There is one downplayed example. Acorns can be gathered and eaten as-is. They don't provide any unusual buffs, but real-life acorns are technically edible... if you first grind them to a pulp and then put the pulp in a sack in a stream of running water for a week to leach out their extremely bitter tannins.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: In addition to the stat-boosting fruits and fungi carried over from the prequel, Hyrule is home to a variety of elemental fruits that, when struck, produce bursts of flame, frost, electricity, water or stunning light. Other unusual plants include muddlebuds, whose pollen disorients living creatures; puffshrooms that release huge clouds of spores when struck; and explosive bomb flowers. All of these can be combined with shields and weapons to take advantage of their properties.
• Littlewood: About half of the vegetables and all fruits are completely fictional species that seem to serve the purpose of reminding the player that the game is taking place in a fantasy setting. Some of the fictional species even seem to be a thinly veiled counterpart to a real one, such as one that is basically broccoli, but blue. They are otherwise perfectly normal cooking ingredients in-universe.
• Fantastical produce appeared twice over the Mana Series. Usually, they resemble real like fruits and vegetables only shaped like a real life animal with a fitting Punny Name i.e Whalemato (a whale-shaped tomato), Cabbadillo (a armadillo-shaped cabbage) and Orangeopus (an octopus-shaped orange) to name a few. What they're useful for varies per game:
  • In Legend of Mana, produce could be fed to the Playable Character's pet to change their stats and behavior or as part of the game's incredibly convoluted crafting system.
  • In Sword of Mana, produce is only used to temper weapons and armors along other more traditional items like ore and animal bones.
• Some of the crops you can grow in Ooblets are just real plants with funny names (sweetiebeeties are beetroots, caroots are carrots, zinookas are blueberries, etc), but others don't match anything in real life. The pompadoot, for example, is shaped like a cylinder, and its juice has similar properties to milk.
• Paleo Pines: The tamablume is a flower that's full of protein, used for making cakes, and has a shiny yellow pistil surrounded by white petals. Its name sounds like a combination of tamago (Japanese for egg) and bloom.
• Pokémon has a wide variety of fruits simply known as "berries". Since Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, they have Punny Names and odd appearances and mysterious properties like the titular Mons. These mainly serve as the main food source for most Pokémon.
  • Most of the fruit that these Pokemon berries are based on aren't really considered berries and a few aren't even considered "fruit", such as the Drash berry, an E-reader only berry which is based on a radish, a root vegetable. In the games, their properties range from simply being ingredients in Pokemon food, curing status ailments like poison or burns, raising happiness (while decreasing certain stats) to granting one-time stat boosts in battle. A few of the stat-boosting berries are apparently so rare that they're only available from getting 100 consecutive wins from post-game battle facilities (which are famous for being downright brutal to players) or only held by certain event-only Pokemon in promotions. This would put them on par with Master Balls, but there's often a way to farm berries in games from Gen III and beyond. In Alola and Galar different kinds of berries even grow on the same tree.
  • Heck, there's even Pokemon who are fruits or vegetables: Exeggecute, Sunkern, Seedot, Ludicolo, Tropius (technically its banana beard), Cherubi, Cherrim, Whimiscott (based on the cotton plant as well as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary), Ferroseed and Ferrothorn^note if horse-chestnuts are considered as "fruit". However, they're equally based on the durian, Bounsweet, Steenee, and Tsareena.
  • There are also a series of inedible fruits in the Johto region called apricorns that served as the invention of the first Pokeball.
    • In the remakes, apricorns can be juiced, and the juice fed to Pokemon to improve their Pokeathelon stats.
• Terraria has Life Fruits, which only spawn in the jungle underground after a defeating a mechanical boss. They are the only way to boost your maximum health after consuming enough Heart Crystals.
• Slime Rancher has a number of different fruits and vegetables you can feed to your slimes, and all are pretty bizarre (except for the carrots). Heart-shaped beets, pears with spikes, mint-flavored mangoes, metallic parsnips, lemons that exist partly out of phase with our reality...
• The Sims 3 has life fruits, which give the Sim who eats one an extra day of life, flame fruits, which aren't actually on fire but do give you a warm fuzzy feeling just by carrying it around, and plasma fruits, which re-fills a vampire Sim's Thirst motive.
• Sonic the Hedgehog games seem to have these when there's a Chao-raising virtual pet minigame. In the original Sonic Adventure, at least, you have cubicle fruit^note misspelled that way in every game that names it, presumably intended to be "cubical", triangle fruit, and round fruit, and then more special ones like Chao fruit ^note shaped like Chao heads, increases a Chao's normal stats for every bite, and heart fruit ^note pink and heart-shaped, makes a Chao fertile and interested in breeding with other Chao. There are also the mushrooms, which increase the hidden intelligence and luck stats and look suspiciously like Mario 1-Up mushrooms.
• Stardew Valley has a few:
  • Stardrops, eating them permanently increases the player's maximum energy level, and it's said that the taste reminds of the player's favourite thing. There's also a limited number of them in the game world.
  • Starfruit (not to be confused with the aforementioned Stardrops), they are the second most valuable crop in the game, and they are used in the building of magical buildings.
  • Sweet Gem Berry, it's said that they are "by far the sweetest thing you've ever smelled", they're inedible, but they sell for the highest price.
  • Ancient Fruit, They're blue-coloured fruits grown from ancient seeds that according to the description have been dormant for eons, they're the third most valuable crop, and also inedible but can be used to make Jelly or Wine which sells for an even higher price.
  • Qi's Fruit, a fruit shaped like Mr Qi's head that only appears during a quest in which the player must ship a certain number of them, once the quest ends then they, alongside any seeds or products made by them completely disappear.
• The Story of Seasons has this in different games:
  • Story of Seasons (2014), in a minor cross over with Super Mario Bros., has the Mystery Seeds from Wheat Country. They take up a whole field alone and will either grow into a Fire Flower, Super Mushroom, or Super Star (which isn't known until fully grown); when picked, they have a different effect on the regular plants around them.
  • Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (and the original, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life) have hybrid crops, which are a blend of two regular crops of the same kind done through the plant Vinnie. (e.g. Bananas with Peaches, or Strawberries with Tomatoes). Then those hybrids can blend into second-level hybrids. There's also blending seeds with various foraged flowers to improve seed quality, seasonal growth, and hardiness, and in the remake blending the wild Trick Blue with any plant makes a blue variant that sells for more than the original.
• The fire flower from the Super Mario Bros. series, which gives Mario the power to throw fireballs. Super Mario Bros. 3 has a leaf that grants Mario tanoonki powers and Super Mario Galaxy has an ice flower, which lets him freeze enemies.
• The Tales Series games have, in addition to the usual selection of apples, bananas, etc., a pair of recurring fictional fruits called "kirima" and "amango".
• In Wild ARMs 3, healing items are various fruits and vegetables, and extremely rare until you get access to a garden, which allows you to grow all you like.
• Unreal has Nali Healing Fruit, kumquat-like yellow fruit that have a strong healing effect on humans^note a full-grown bush will randomly heal between 28 and 30 Hit Points, whereas a medkit only heals 20. These grow in small bushes and should you happen upon any seeds, they can be tossed on literally any solid surface and a bush will grow to full maturity in less than a minute.

Webcomics

• The Lydian Option features both a cafeteria full of "cross-nutritional" foods for multiple species and a highly addictive alien fruit.
• In Poharex there's the Blue Fruit, which grow only in a certain valley, and cause addiction, madness, and eventually paralysis.
• Unsounded: Hedgeapples are a common fruit, often used as an ingredient in bigger dishes. They're round with little nodules and light colored flesh and taste like woody pears.

Web Games

• Neopets uses an assortment of them. Examples include the Tchea Fruit, the Ummagine, the Tigersquash and the Juppie. This is zig-zagged however as they coexist with real-world produce such as apples and bananas.
• Subeta has the Ikumoradeekanox tree, which itself is kinda bizarre-looking (blue bark with white spots, no leaves to speak of). Once a day, you can pick a random fruit from it. Sometimes the fruit is mundane and familiar, but more often it's a very weird fruit.

Web Original

• "Dogscape", one of Creepypasta's creepiest and Squicktastic stories http://dogscape.blogspot.com/2010/10/log-one.html had the "puppy fruits".
• The world of Neopets is filled with many varieties of fantastical fruits and vegetables, which coexist alongside real-life ones. A few notable examples include the Chokato, Doughnutfruit, the various types of Negg, the fruits associated with Mystery Island's Gadgadsbogen festival, and the berries that can be acquired through Meri Acres Farm's Pick Your Own game.
• Brother Calbach's Herbal from The Wanderer's Library is a book devoted to them.

Western Animation

• Anything the Kiwi can grow on Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. An episode involved trees that grew nutritious marshmallows.
• The world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Land of Mix-and-Match Critters such as platypus-bears and wolfbats, apparently also has "tomato-carrots."
• Beast Machines: in the episode "Forbidden Fruit" one of their newest team members, a techno-organic vehicon with a bat mode named Nightscream, offers the members fruits from a towering organic fruit tree to help their organic components. However, the fruit magnifies their bestial sides that dominate over their robotic minds, turning them animalistic and feral. The maximals are restored when Cheetor (the only one who rejected the fruit out of misguided suspicion of Nightscream) cuts down the tree's trunk.
• Chowder has nothing but these. The exploding blast razes, bombergranates and grenapes; the fizzy river juice fruit, which looks like a can of soda and can unleash a river of juice; flossberries, which look like a tangled ball if blue dental floss; the musical jingleberries: the list goes on and on.
• In one episode of Futurama, among the gifts given to Fry after he leaves the Planet Express to sleep in Bender's apartment is a miniature fruit salad tree offered by Leela. Fry picks a tiny banana among the half-inch sized fruits, eats it, and tosses the skin on the floor (which Amy promptly slips on).
• In The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible, the Forbidden Fruit from the Garden of Eden is depicted as looking like a beet with a yellow top (only it grows from a tree, not in the ground.) Similarly, the Tree of Life's fruit (the antidote to the Tree of Knowledge) looks rather like an eggplant. Justified, in that it's not known what these fruits were or might have been based on. ^note  The Tree of Knowledge is usually depicted as an apple tree because the Latin word for "apple" (mālum) is very close to the word for "evil" (malum). However, most scholars agree that an apple even being known in ancient Mesopotamia would have been very farfetched indeed; apples originated further to the East, somewhere around what's now Kazakhstan.
• Korgoth of Barbaria had plum-like fruits that make whoever eats them explode violently.
• The Legend of Korra briefly showed "Cucumber-quats" (presumably a cucumber/kumquat hybrid).
• Much of the action in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Family Appreciation Day" involves the Apple family being busy with the harvest of Zap Apples, a magical breed of apple that sprouts delicious rainbow-colored fruit... fruit which only grows following a series of ominous-looking signs, and which disappears not long after if it's not picked as soon as possible.
• My Little Pony: Make Your Mark has the Earth Ponies practice their newly acquired plant magic by growing hybrids like banana-kumquats or cucumber-oranges.
• The Simpsons: In the episode "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)", Homer manages to create tomato/tobacco hybrids. They look like tomatoes but are brown on the inside and highly addictive. Every plant save one is eaten by local wildlife, and the last one ends up in the hands of the tobacco industry. They really do appreciate it, though.
• The Smurfs (1981) have smurfberries, which are red in the cartoon show, but in The Sony Pictures live-action film series are blue.
• The Member Berries of South Park are grapes with human faces that continually talk about how great the past was, in order to create nostalgia in humans. They're annoying enough when giving paeans to Star Wars ad nauseam, but they also praise all the things from the past that modern society judges unacceptable.

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