since i always have fruits in the house to eat, i was trying to think of 10 monocot fruits (in the culinary sense, not the botanical sense), and i could only think of 2: bananas and pineapples. so i asked my browser’s Copilot AI to give me 10 monocot fruits, and it gave me 3 more good ones: dates, coconuts, and acai. but it also gave me some that aren’t really culinary fruits: vanilla, plantains, corn, etc. and it also gave me a series of bad suggestions: jackfruit (dicot), starfruit (dicot), mangosteen (dicot), sugarcane (not a fruit), betelnut (more of a recreational drug).
after correcting it several times, i gave up. i wonder if there are actually 10 monocot fruits that are commonly produced by farmers?
As an urban gardener with only a few square meters of balcony space, and also as a bee enthusiast, I am quite fond of annual and perennial herbaceous dicots – they often have a fairly long blooming period, which is good for the insects, and they are more useful for me in terms of growing food because it is possible to get meaningful harvests even with just a few plants, which would not be the case with cereal crops. I make an exception for Alliums (and also – reluctantly – for Muscari, because it blooms at a time when there are few other flowers available for the early spring bees).
My house plants, by contrast, are mostly monocots, though a few eudicots/magnoliids have managed to sneak in (Kalanchoe, Peperomia, Basella, Oxalis).
Given current concerns about pollinator decline, monocots – or at least the grains/grasses – may have a survival advantage, since they are more likely to rely on wind pollination than those dicots that are relevant to humans as food crops.
I looked through the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_fruits
While I am not sure that all the plants on this list are actively grown as crops and eaten as fruit, there do seem to be a few additional monocot candidates, mostly palms:
I have a garlic intolerance, so I tend to avoid anything that tastes of garlic. Sadly, I have many food intolerances. Thank goodness, onions are not among them.
I may be biased, but Poaceae are clearly the worst. (I have a grass pollen allergy). I don’t think monocots can make up for that.*
Additionally, I’m German, and my best friend is Peruvian. It would be base treachery against both countries to not acknowledge the fact that potatoes are the best foodstuffs and therefore the best plant. Boil ‘em, mesh ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew!
So, dicots win!
(* Actually really like Poaceae, it’s my third favourite plant taxon, but don’t tell anyone)
