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 only have the most pedestrian understanding of the IPA from a single class in college (which was a long time ago), so I’ll admit I just grabbed the IPA off of Wiktionary for “fruit,” “vegetable,” and “fudge” to bridge between the two. It looks good enough to my eyes to be at least reasonable.
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.
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 only have the most pedestrian understanding of the IPA from a single class in college (which was a long time ago), so I’ll admit I just grabbed the IPA off of Wiktionary for “fruit,” “vegetable,” and “fudge” to bridge between the two. It looks good enough to my eyes to be at least reasonable.
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.