One of the things that made the Mos Espa scenes in Episodes I and II feel so real (aside from, y’know, shooting on location with real sets and minimal ‘digital backlot’) was its use of background detail—things like market stalls selling produce. These are really only featured in secondary materials, but they’re still fascinating. I always thought it would be very cool—if I lived somewhere with an appropriate environment and had an appropriate venue—to do an interpretive display of Tatooine foodstuffs. Something like this:
One of the supposed foodstuffs sold at such stalls is the ‘sidi gourd*’, which we got our first look at back in 1999 in the Episode I Visual Dictionary (p.48):
When placed next to a ‘driss pod*’, ‘haroun bread’, or balls of ‘spicy ahrisa’, it seems very exotic and evocative of the local Tatooine culture…but if you’re familiar with some exotic species on This Planet, it’s a little disappointing.
The Sidi gourd is… (drumroll, please) … a pod from the Australian Banksia tree!
This makes its identification as a foodstuff doubly funny, because banksia pods are so hard and dense that they’re more often found sold as raw materials for woodturning projects:
**Clever naming, LFL… ‘Sidi Driss’ is the name of the real-world hotel that operates out of the belowground portion of the Lars homestead in Tunisia!
Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy 