Have you ever been happily perusing the produce stand, feeling virtuous about your healthy and sustainable choices, when suddenly you see a winter squash that looks like a giant boner? You start to giggle, then the giggle swells to a guffaw, and by the time you’ve Instagrammed the cheeky veg and hashtagged it #bonerfruit, you have to sit down for several minutes on a park bench to recover.
Without ruffling any Creationist myths, let’s say this: Nature has given us a bounty of fruits and vegetables, and it’s also given us hilarious genitals, so it only makes sense that once in a while it would prank us with some phallic, vulvic, and even butt-like produce.
For its recent Gender issue, food mag Lucky Peach played on the sexual connotations of different foods with two covers (see below), one “for men” (featuring penis-shaped carrots and popsicles) and one “for women” (complete with figs, cherries, and other foods redolent of the female anatomy). But amusingly shaped courgettes and naughty strawberries have been making farmers laugh for centuries. And now, with the power of the Internet, a potato that looks like a pair of knockers can go viral, bringing joy to the world before it nourishes some lucky diner who gets to eat a baked potato that looks like boobs.
Here, we celebrate some of the most egregiously sexual fruits and vegetables in recent history. Click through the gallery to see an erect eggplant, a buttocks-like tomato, and other XXX fruits and vegetables that have slipped into nature’s bounty, like a naked lady spliced into a Disney reel.