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have you ever been at a restraunt and asked for the Quinoa on the menu, and
the waiter gets upset because you did not say Kañiwa.

people are always putting themselves in situations that will annoy them.

so in the tradition of annoying themselves someone decided to call the plant
"Chenopodium quinoa" Quinoa if you wright it down and pronounce it by the name Kañiwa

but the problem is that Kañiwa is another plant "Chenopodium pallidicaule"

the 2 plants are easy to tell apart as one of them has a toxic seed coating of saponins, and the other has no toxic seed coating and can not be commercially grown.

Chenopodium quinoa (Quinoa): has toxic seed coating, can be commercially grown, sold at trader joes.
Chenopodium pallidicaule (Kañiwa): has no toxic seed coating, can not be commercially grown, sold nowhere I have ever seen.

this entry from Wikipedia does not add to the confusion, and might even clear it up some.
"Kañiwa is a species of goosefoot, similar in character and uses to the closely related quinoa. It has important beneficial characteristics including tolerance of high mountain conditions and the grain's high protein content and lack of the saponins which complicate quinoa use, but its domestication is not complete and non-uniformity of grain ripening is a limitation."

the description from the back of the box at trader joes just makes things worse in the first line.


I just think the whole thing is strange,
I am not very picky about launguage, but
I do get kind of annoyed when someone corrects me for saying something that should be very normal.
I rarely go to this much work to prove that someone is annoying,
but you know that something is really wrong when the waiter corrects you for anything.

why would anyone wright it down correctly, then pronounce it another way ? especially when the pronunciation is of another thing entirely.

anyone know the history behind this ?
all I know is that "quinoa" was sometimes historicly used to describe "Chenopodium pallidicaule" and "Chenopodium quinoa", but the name Kañiwa was never historicly used to describe "Chenopodium quinoa"

I will entirely forget about this until I next check my blog comments.