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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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’?
Coconuts aren’t nuts, despite the name.
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.
I am sad to say that, although I’ve heard of this, I have never had the pleasure of eating such a tomato.
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.
Great point. “Tomato smoothie” is already a term that makes me feel a little bit queasy, but adding in the corn…
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
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.
Who 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.