inconvenient truth: the same plant that produces prickly pears is also the source of nopales, but you can't get both from the same plant because nopales have to be harvested before the fruit grows and the plant can't grow fruit after you take off the nopales (in fact I think it dies and has to be replanted?)

@Felthry wikipedia says prickly pears and nopales are the same thing?

@noiob prickly pears are the fruit, nopales are grilled cactus pads

@Felthry a lot of things can be called "nopal", apparently

@noiob yeah looking it up apparently it's just the Spanish word for the plant or something

@Felthry we don't have edible cacti here

@Felthry well, we don't have any cacti here, natively

@Felthry ah, there's also a ton of cacti known as prickly pear, and they hybridzise easily

@noiob yeah it's a whole genus i think? but it's like different varieties of apple, they're more like different flavors of the same fruit than anything