An ancestor of stone fruits such as nectarines, peaches, plums and cherries, the almond is categorized botanically as a fruit. The almond fruit grows on trees closely resembling peach trees in size and shape, and has a tough gray-green hull that looks similar to an elongated peach.  At maturity, the hull splits opento reveal the almond shell, which encloses the nut.

Almonds are believed to be one of the world’s oldest cultivated foods, but theories differ on how, exactly, they evolved into one of nature’s most nutritious foods.  One theory holds they originated in ancient China and central Asia, evolving from a wild species, prunus ulmifolia.  Others contend almonds originated on the steppes between the former Soviet Republics nd northwestern Iran.

What is known is that almonds were a valuable commodity on the “Silk Road” between Asia and the Mediterranean.  Explorers carried almonds with them as sustenance, and much of the land they were passing through provided fertile ground for the kernels they dropped along the route.  Dry, hot summer and winter rains proved to be ideal growing conditions.  Thus, almond trees spread to the Mediterranean, where they flourished in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and throughout the region.

Almonds were mentioned in Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the Old Testament of the Bible, and in records of ancient Greece.  A Greek history of plants written in about 3000 B.C. mentioned the almond tree as the only one in Greece producing blossoms before leaves.  About 100 years later, the ancient Romans brought these “Greek nuts” home with them.  Romans were so thrilled with almonds that they introduced them throughout the Roman Empire, from Egypt all the way to England.

Spain and Italy eventually became the first major almond producers, cultivating them in their warm, dry climates as a flavorful food and for their light, silken oil. Almonds traveled with explorers from Spain, and it wasn’t long before the nuts’ fame had spread to the New World.

In the mid-1700s, Franciscan Padres planted almond trees to grace their missions along El Camino Real (The Royal Road), which stretched along the California coast from present-day San Diego to Sonoma.  But the cool, wet weather of the coast hindered development of almonds as an annual crop.  It wasn’t until settlers began moving further inland that they discovered almonds flourished in the Mediterranean-like climate for which central California has become famous.  Almond orchards began to prosper in the Sacramento and San Joaquin areas of the state’s Central Valley.  By the 1880s, research and crossbreeding had produced several of today’s prominent almond varieties.  And by the turn of the century, the California almond industry was firmly established.

Today, the sweet almond variety grows in the Central Valley. Delicate and slightly sweet in flavor, sweet almonds are readily available in supermarkets.

California is the only place in North America that grows almonds commercially. A $2 billion industry, more than 6,000 growers devote an estimated 530,000 acres in the Central Valley to almonds — California’s largest tree nut crop — in a stretch of land extending from below Bakersfield in the south to Red Bluff in the north.

In fact, this region produces 75 percent of the world’s almond supply, and virtually 100 percent of the United States’.  California almonds are exported to more than 80 countries.