Actually, “mushrooms are technically meat” is a new hill I’d like to die on. Mushrooms have animal cells, ergo, definitely not a vegetable.
They don’t, they’re a distinct third thing with a distinct third type of cells
They are, however, more closely related to us animals than they are to plants. As in, our last common ancestor is less far back.
Also, unrelated to your comment, but related to the post: vegetable isn’t a botanical term, but a culinary term. So, there’s no bioligical basis for vegetable in the first place, so there’s no issue with counting mushrooms among them. Sure, it’s a bit inconvenient that the word ‘fruit’ is both a culinary and a botanical term in English, and there’s overlap to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s somehow illogical that some things are culinarilu fruits but not botanically, and vice versa.
What do you mean?
Leave mycelium alone
Why is it yourcelium
It’s everybody’s celium. Mycelium. Yourcelium. Ourcelium.
It’s ourcelium komrad
Better check your privilegelium
Always dismiss those people who talk about how tomatoes are fruits as nerds. The category “vegetable” in the kitchen usually refers to more savory plants, not that what part of the fruit it is. Also if you’re still one of those “um, ackchually, tomatoes are fruits” kind of people, then eat tomatoes like apples. Maybe even some chili peppers too, they’re berries.
A burger meal is mostly vegetable and fruits, vegetable bread a thin slice of meat. served with vegetable potatoes (fries), vegetable hot sauce, tomatoes, and a vegetable drink filled with the vegetable corn syrup.
vegetables are good for you, they say.
My driving instructor ate tomatoes like apples, got a whole wooden crate of them in the morning and a shaker of salt, I probably could’ve mowed down a few pedestrians as long as that man had his tomatoes.
It’s just interesting that there’s a distinction between botanical and culinary classification. Once you realise that there are two different systems that don’t necessarily need to completely agree then it’s not a big deal.
…also, what exactly is wrong with taking a bite out of a tomato like an apple? They’re delicious.
Vegetables aren’t even a thing botanically, they’re basically “plant stuff that isn’t fruit”, except when it is.
Botanically speaking, vegetables can be roots (carrots, beets), stems (celery, asparagus), leaves (spinach, lettuce), flowers (broccoli, cauliflower) seeds (peas, beans), and of course fruits that we treat as savory (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants).
And then on the opposite side you have things we call fruits that botanically speaking aren’t. Rhubarb is a stem, strawberries are aggregate accessory fruits where the fleshy part we eat is actually swollen stem tissue, and those little “seeds” on the outside are the real fruits of the plant. Figs are not simple fruits, they’re inverted flower clusters where the “fruit” is actually a hollow stem containing many tiny real fruits inside.
Even apples and pears aren’t true fruits botanically, they’re accessory fruits where much of what we eat comes from the flower’s receptacle rather than just the ovary.
So yeah the botanical vs. culinary divide works both ways. Our everyday food categories are really more about taste, texture, and how we use foods rather than plant biology.
Who the hell calls rhubarb a fruit?
unironically tho eating tomatoes straight up is pretty fire
Tomatoes and fruits are a great litmus test (no pun intended) to see if a person can recognize the domain of their knowledge. Some people glomp onto a fact that is correct in some scenarios and use it as an “umm actually” where it isn’t appropriate or even correct (like the definition of racism)
This is the kind of guy who eats tomatoes as fruits
Do you want to be like that guy?
I agree, salads are morally reprehensible
As someone who thinks tomatoes are vegetables, I would eat more tomatoes like apples if they didn’t give me canker sores every time.
it could be the acidic content, or you’re allergic to it.
Big Mushroom is going to take out OP, Boeing-style.
They’re going to fly a holding pattern over his house until one of the doors inevitably falls off?
Sure, but they are fun guys!
Tomatoes are fun guys indeed.
lol, very good.
Fun-gu(y)s
“Are red pandas carnivores or herbivores?” “They eat like 80% bamboo, so herbivores.” “Wrong! They are taxonomically in the order carnivora, making them carnivores! Please ignore that carnivore also just means meat eater and herbivore isn’t even a taxonomic clade. People only ever talk to me to get mad at this switching between casual and scientific definitions, I am nothing without it.”
Let’s not forget that apples, strawberries and cashews are pseudofruits, just like the produce of my labor!
Yeah but a mushroom’s such a fungi to be with.
He’s such a fun guy that there’s not mushroom to party.
anybody know any other mushroom puns i want free upvotes
This is neither shitposti nor shiitake
The cast of Vegitales lied to me!
The whole fruit/vegetable controversy only comes because we’re trying to use two different domains of terms interchangeably: botanical terms and culinary terms.
Tomatoes (and squash, and pumpkins (which, side note, are a type of squash), and cucumbers) are botanically fruits, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as vegetables because they tend to be less sweet, particularly when raw. Mushrooms are botanically…well, I guess they’re botanically “n/a”, as they’re not a part of the plantae kingdom, but whatever–they’re typically considered botanical, so they’re “botanically” fungi, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as vegetables (or, interestingly, as meat replacements).
We get into the same linguistic confusion when we start throwing around “peanuts aren’t nuts, they’re legumes!”–botanically, yes, peanuts are legumes, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as nuts. See also: “green beans” are botanically pods, not beans, but we use them culinarily as vegetables; and many “berries” are botanically something else but we use them culinarily as berries; meaning they’re often left whole, mixed with other berries in the same dish, and go well with cream in cold summer desserts.
The whole thing is a misguided exercise in pedantry; “technically burritos aren’t sandwiches, they’re meat-sacks!” They’re both, and we instinctively understand that trying to compare the two terms is silly because “sandwich” is a culinary term and “sack” is not.
Another funny part of this is that pedants are trying to say that tomatoes are (botanically) fruits and not vegetables, but the closest thing to a definition we have for “vegetable” botanically is “literally all plant life and maybe also some fungi,” so tomatoes are clearly both fruit and vegetable botanically.Plus, they’re culinarily used as vegetables, but can also be used as fruits in some cakes, pies, sorbets, and so forth (and isn’t ketchup just a tomato smoothie?), so tomatoes are clearly both fruit and vegetable in culinary terms as well.edit: Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about (an ecologist) has corrected my botanical definition of “vegetable.” Actually, they’re “edible parts of a plant which are not fruit.” Which means that tomatoes are explicitly excluded as vegetables, being botanically a fruit. I don’t think that ruins my overall point in any way, though.
Fun facts, in French vegetables are called “legumes”, even though most of them aren’t related to the Fabaceae family
I’m so glad that this problem isn’t just limited to English.
Spanish doesn’t have a word for nuts, they just say “dried fruit”.
What do they call actual dried fruit?
I mean they’re not really that different, right?
Yeah, I’d say they’re really different.
Haha me too… I mean a coconut is not really ‘dry’?
ceci n’est pas drole
ceci n’est pas drole
Would anyone actually use the term Soupe aux légumineuses or just be direct about what’s in it?
And as far as the vast majority of people are concerned, the culinary definition is the one that’s actually relevant for them.
Another similar thing is the definition of ripe.
A fruit can be ripe for consumption (culinary ripeness), and it can be ripe for seed-bearing (botanical ripeness). You can see the difference with cucumbers, which are ripe for eating when they are green and the seeds are barely developed, while they are close to inedible when ripe for seed-bearing. Then they will turn yellow, the pulp shrinks down and becomes slimy and the seeds become big and hard.
Oh dang, I hadn’t even considered that! I wonder if that’s the same across all fruits we tend to eat raw.
No, most are actually at their best when the seeds are ripe too, but there are others where culinary ripeness doesn’t equal seed ripeness, like e.g.green bell peppers.
Ah, once again, nature refuses to be easily categorized! Thanks.
I am 100% with your well written explanation here!
Just one ‘nitpick’, that isn’t really even a nitpick because you did qualify the relevant part with ‘tend to be’:
A properly grown tomato absolutely can be so flavorful, sweet, tangy, varied, complex… that you could just eat it like an apple.
Not as sweet as most apples, but way, way more sweet than the typical mass produced tomato you’re likely to get in the US.
I’ve been to a few farmers markets where… a couple of smaller farms were growing just absolutely stellar quality tomatoes.
…
On the other hand, squash and zucchini, even the fancy ones from farmers markets?
Main difference I noticed was basically perfect ripeness, they still just taste like nothing.
(I guess I should also point out this was from 10ish years back, sadly, a lot of farmers markets now have a lot of people basically just reselling some particular, slightly higher quality but still mass produced fruits and veggies, than aren’t even local)
…
Finally, to throw more insanity on this terminology dumpster fire…
Corn.
Corn is arguably, from different domains of technical or colloquial meaning… a fruit, vegetable, and grain.
After millennia of us artifically selecting (and then just outright genetically engineering) what was originally, basically a kind of grass, we now have something that is now so sweet, that the US uses it to make HFCS, a cane sugar substitute… and then we jam that HFCS … into bread, soda, everything.
So… ketchup… is then roughly a tomato/corn smoothie, made primarily from two… frui-getables.
Yep.
Fruigetable.
(froojzh-tah-bull)
((im too lazy to look up IPA symbols))
You’re welcome, bwahahah!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
A properly grown tomato absolutely can be so flavorful, sweet, tangy, varied, complex… that you could just eat it like an apple.
I am sad to say that, although I’ve heard of this, I have never had the pleasure of eating such a tomato.
Finally, to throw more insanity on this terminology dumpster fire…
Corn.
As a native son of Indiana, I have to say that’s the thing that breaks pretty much all of my categories. I lived the first twenty years of my life thinking that it qualified nutritionally (ugh, that’s another part of this terminology dumpster fire…the food pyramid. shudder) as a vegetable, which it…doesn’t really.
So… ketchup… is then roughly a tomato/corn smoothie, made primarily from two… frui-getables.
Great point. “Tomato smoothie” is already a term that makes me feel a little bit queasy, but adding in the corn…
Fruigetable.
Beautiful. fɹud͡ʒ.tə.bəl, I think, incidentally.
Beautiful. fɹud͡ʒ.tə.bəl, I think, incidentally.
That seems right to me, the… what is that a lower case sigma?
iirc, thats the sort of… rolling ‘zh’ sound I was going for…
… though I think maybe we just have a natural dialect difference for how how to pronounce vegetable, as you’ve got the same vowel sound for the last two syllables?
But anyway, yeah, I think I came up with ‘fruigtable’ almost 20 years ago, upon first learning how much overlap there is due to all this linguistic silliness… so i choose chaos, and decided to add to it, and now I finally have a relevant time to use the nonsense/compound word, woo!
i can totally eat small flavourful tomatoes on their own, but something about the idea of biting into a larger tomato feels very unsettling to me, i think it’s the amount of loose slimy flesh around the seeds?
when the tomatoes are small enough they’re just berries, which works fine
I completely agree with 99% of bigger tomatoes, but… I evidently just cannot forget those few, exceptionally good heirloom tomatoes somebody had grown back in the PNW a decade ago, hah!
Could be worse, don’t take a bite out a … tomacco.
Great post, with one caveat
the closest thing to a definition we have for “vegetable” botanically is “literally all plant life and maybe also some fungi,”
I got my degree in Ecology and Evolution, and we always used a similar working definition but it was “edible parts of a plant which are not fruit.” So basically botanically, stems, roots, leaves, flowers, and all subvarieties of those are vegetables. Fruits are fruits. Fungi are fungi.
I always heard that biologically vegetables doesn’t exist. Everything is fruit. (Except grain, flowers, the obvious)
So what are potatoes? That just a tuberculo.
Carrot? Just a root. Yes it’s edible to humans but biologists don’t really care because everything is edible to something.
Disclaimer: not a biologist, just a dude tired of people violently interrupting me to tell me that “akschually a strawberry is a nut!!!”
Yes, you’re correct but that’s why I said it was a “working” definition. When you’re a botanist (like many of my former professors) you still use the word vegetable in discussion. They would often teach us about local plants with indigenous uses using plain language like “the Chumash used the leaves of this plant as an important part of their vegetable intake”, rather than using some clinical term like “edible plant matter” or whatever.
I was only saying in these contexts, they definitely wouldn’t describe fruits as vegetables because fruit are a specific thing to a botanist. They definitely wouldn’t describe fungi as vegetables because they are also a specific thing to a botanist (not relevant 😂)
So in a scientific setting the word vegetable is still used, but it is mostly defined by what it’s not!
But when you translate “vegetable intake” to my language Danish it will have a totally different meaning. I am assuming that it means eating plant matter as you mention. I am wondering if it is a similar challenge in other languages. Because “grøntsag” will not be leaves of some tree in the Amazon, or tobacco, or a edible cactus.
It will just refer to that part that kids never eat from their dinner plate.
I guess there is a reason why it is not a very scientific language 😅
Awesome, thank you for the correction. I appreciate your expert review!
The crucial difference is that the culinary classifications have no scientific basis.
the closest thing to a definition
we“we” have for“vegetable”vegetable botanicallyWho is “we”? People (ITT) who study botany have functional, scientific definitions.
The culinary classifications have no scientific basis, but they do have an anthropological basis. They’re not completely meaningless.
Who is “we”?
I was basing that on a misunderstanding: I thought that the word “vegetation” being an archaic term meant that it was no longer used, but yeah, I was incorrect there. I appreciate the correction.
good post, sounds like a copypasta
Alas, it’s all me. I…tend to be a bit verbose.
Oh–and thanks! I think that’s praise, at least.
I mean it in a most sincere and endearing way. Gave me a joy and chuckle.
Excellent to hear. That’s what I was hoping for!
You must be fun at parties.
I am actually…kind of just like this at parties. So, you be the judge.
It is a bit weird that we use some fruits as “vegetables”, like tomatoes and cucumbers. But, other fruits like mango or raspberry are so different from your typical “culinary vegetable” that you have to be very careful in how you use it in a savoury dish. There isn’t the same crossover for other edible plants. For example, I can’t think of any tuber that could sneak into a fruit salad unnoticed.
I guess it comes down to there being a lot more variety among fruits than other edible plant parts. Plus, humans have been tweaking edible plants for millennia. So, who knows, maybe the original cucumber was more “fruity”, but has been tuned over the years to be more “saladey”.
Jicama would be quite good in fruit salad.
I could see water chestnuts in a fruit salad, although they’re technically corms, not tubers.
For example, I can’t think of any tuber that could sneak into a fruit salad unnoticed.
It’s not whole, but I can definitely imagine tapioca being used to thicken the juice for a fruit salad, and that comes from cassava, a tuber.
For example, I can’t think of any tuber that could sneak into a fruit salad unnoticed.
Some sweet potatoes can be very sweet indeed, and they can be used in sweet dishes too (I’ve seen for example, sweet potato mash topped with marshmallows). They are just too porous to be used in a traditional fruit salad.
I guess it comes down to there being a lot more variety among fruits than other edible plant parts.
Pulses are incredibly variable too in their usage. You can use them as nuts, vegetables, grains, oil or pastes (sweet and savoury). You can use them in place of potatoes, you can bake bread from them, you can even use them to replace meat in many situations. Young sweet peas can be used almost in place of some fruit as well.
So, who knows, maybe the original cucumber was more “fruity”, but has been tuned over the years to be more “saladey”.
Cucumbers are a kind of pumpkin, same as melons. They are all variations of the same original fruit, and yes, some of them are clearly in fruit-salad territory, while others are more saladey and others again can be used in place of potatoes.
And lastly, the most crazy variable plant is Brassica. Different cultivars of this one plant provide swede, turnip, kohlrabi, cabbage, collard, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, romanesco, Brussels sprouts, mustard seed, rape seed and a lot of smaller, lesser known things too.
Some sweet potatoes can be very sweet
Yeah, there are sweet tubers. But, you can’t put a raw piece of sweet potato in a fruit salad. If you cooked it to bring out the sweetness it would be as sweet as the fruit in the salad, but it would stand out for being very mushy.
Pulses are incredibly variable too in their usage.
I haven’t heard the term “pulse” before, I’ve heard “legumes”. But, yeah, that group has a lot of variety. Red beans are frequently used as a sweet filling in east Asian cooking, chickpeas as crunchy snacks, etc.
It’s more an issue of consistency than of taste though with sweet potatoes. There are some fruits that also don’t fit into a fruit salad for similar reasons, like e.g. passion fruit or very soft kinds of nectrarines.
But I have seen ginger in fruit salad before.
Like, a big knob of ginger? Or just ginger shavings?
Definitely interesting. I wonder if there might also be a little bit to the fact that botanical fruits are basically just the best way to house seeds so that they’ll have some energy to grow when planted, which means that it’s independently evolved in a lot of different plants; so the culinary diversity of “fruits” is much greater.
Yeah, that seems likely to me too. Especially because some fruits are designed to appeal to animals who will eat the fruit and then poop out the seeds somewhere, and different fruits will appeal to different animals. A fruit “designed” to be spread by birds will be different to one “designed” to be spread by a hippo.
Tumblr is the neo-positivist/neo-berkeleyianism hivemind as a result from the inoculation by western STEM ideology. They love their AKSHUALLY WOW MINDBLOWN spiel.
Fungi only got its own kingdom in 1969, before that they were a phylum in Plantae. There are tons of people still around who learned “mushrooms are plants” in school, so it’s not surprising downstream vocabulary hasn’t caught up.
They have properties from plants but also from animals, it’s an independent evolution from both.
Idk that food vernacular is necessarily downstream of rigorous taxonomies at all lol.
Fair point haha.
Mushrooms are obviously fruit
Mushrooms deserve their own kingdom
Yeah, fungi fruit. Mycelium is fungi vegeble
knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. wisdom is taking that tomato, pureeing it into a sauce, and slathering it on a well done steak
WTF… Well done steak smothered in tomato puree…
/boggle
and slathering it on a well done steak
Burn the heretic!
TBF, if your steak is well done, you’re probably gonna need some sauce since half the flavor has been cooked out of it.
My family always got well done at restaurants. Told me medium rare is for werewolves. No surprise they dumped brown sauce on it. My God what a revelation when I got medium the 1st time.
Medium is for burgers. Medium rare is where it’s at for steak.
This guy beefs like I beef, meaning it’s the correct beef!
Or slicing it to throw on a mashed avocado for tasty guacamole
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