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These ones are barely sweet. Orange ones I tried before were sweet, but these red ones aren't. You can make wine from them, I watched an italian guy do it in youtube a few hours ago. There's also white ones but I haven't seen those yet.

Shiner Brewing in Texas makes a fruit beer out of them most every summer.

My immediate thought was: I wonder what they'd taste like as wine.

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sweet, true, but...

DANGER!!! NOTE TO ALL HERE! Eating Succulents caused mankind misery for thousands of years! Destroys tooth enamel!

Cacti create a special crystal , like fine grit, throughout its body with nano-particle sharp edges in supertiny crystals in its flesh to ensure few desert animals will ever evolve to eat cactus.

You do not notice its tooth destruction immediately.

Tooth enamel is hard , it is hydroxyapatite. But Cactus is harder.

Dug up native american bones in southwest from hundreds of years ago show horrific teeth damage from cactus chewing.

Occasional cactus eating (Mexican napolitos aka "huevos con nopales") can be repaired by morning saliva the next morning on the outside from re-mineralization, if a human sips no water for 25 minutes after waking up, but not if too often eating cactus.

you can dine on cactus in 20% of south west mexican diners north of the border : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nopalito but its young , pickled, yet still ruins teeth if chronically consumed.

I cannot find any simple web pages describing any of my claims, not one. But my claims are 100% solid facts. Botany books all focus on alkaloid defenses, but the cactus has more than that to dissuade mammals.

I found ONE paper from 2016 that says for TEETH of animals cactus has 0% of calcium oxalate in the fruiting bodies meant for animal dispersal and consumption. They carefully measured all sections of the cactus species thay cared about :

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27451142/


This means the dead sad tooth-ruined skeletons from 500 years ago across USA anthropologists USED TO DIG UP should have eaten less cactus and ONLY the fruiting bodies like the picture the OP showed. I guess juice and pulp of fruit does not harm mammals.

Fossilized shit analysis of the tooth-destroyed native americans showed they all ate far too much cactus and shit out the Calcium oxalate crystals in Archaic coprolites (Fossilized shit). One and One makes two.

They might have been chronically chewing AGAVES in some ancient feces piles not DNA tested. AGAVES ruin teeth just like the OPs cactus does :

2015: Agave Chewing and Dental Wear


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133710





Rodents evolved to eat prickly pear and bore into it, but rodents have ever-growing front teeth.

Humans will perish toothless if they subsist on cactus too often.

It is possible the fruiting sweet buds of Opuntia (shown by OP) are meant to be eaten and dispersed by mammals, and have less stony micro crystals

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OMG! I was wondering why nobody fermented them - I guess your name is nobody!

Like a kiwi watermellon. This red one is not very sweet. There's an orange one I harvested last year which is sweeter. The flesh where it connects to the cactus leaf is just slightly salty, somewhat like the cacti leaf. The inside with seed pods is watery and dissolves. The seed pods are hard and non-toxic, you can swallow them if you want your insides cleaned. Then the flesh surrounding is chewy like a cantaloupe, but a lot softer.

I've picked a cacti leaf a few times. You gotta pick a young one. They're ok in a salad. Better cut in slices and fried in butter/oil complementing some eggs. I think I'd rather just leave the leaf to grow some more pears.

A truly hard pill to swallow.

Can confirm. Harvested a bunch of pears off of beaver tail cactus, a little cousin that grows in the high desert.

Brought them home and burned the spines off. Evidently, I didn't know what I was doing because I spent the next hour or so pulling tiny little spines out of my tongue and palate.

Good times :)

Hadn't heard that about the seeds and I believe it.

Fruit is good for diverticulitis and the beetus.

What's up, dock?