How to Treat Fruits and Vegetables Correctly
If you think you’re smart because you know the tomato is a fruit, buckle up. You’re right, but tomatoes are also a vegetable. And rice is a fruit. And some things you think are fruits – like strawberries – are not really what they seem.
“Vegetable” is not a scientific term
Before we get into what fruits are, we need to talk about vegetables. You won’t open a botany textbook and find nothing about vegetables; it’s just a term that we non-scientists use to describe our food. Merriam-Webster has a typical definition :
usually a herb (such as kale, beans, or potatoes) grown for the edible portion, which is usually eaten as part of a meal; See also: such an edible part
I asked our own Claire Lower how she would define a vegetable, and she replied, “The part of the plant that is commonly used in savory dishes and does not taste sweet.”
Note that the way we use this term in the kitchen is different from how we would use it in food analysis. Potatoes are starchy, so I consider them an alternative to other starchy foods (like bread, rice and pasta). If I ask my kids to eat their vegetables, I don’t think a bowl of mashed potatoes will work. So are potatoes a vegetable ? Yes and no.
Glad we cleared that up.
What is a Fruit?
There are several definitions of fruit . The first is what you know when you see: apples, peaches, raspberries, and so on. They usually have seeds and taste sweet. This is a culinary definition.
But for biologists, fruit is also a technical term. Just grab the botany textbook closest to you – everyone has it, right? – and you will see that the fruit is:
In angiosperms, a structure that is formed from carpels and associated tissues after fertilization.
Angiosperms are flowering plants. The carpore is an ovary that you can often see or feel as a lump at the base of the flower. This means that the fruit is what the fertilized flower turns into.
You may have heard that a fruit is something with seeds inside. It is true that practically everything that contains seeds is fruit, including apples (many seeds), peaches (one seed), and bananas (brown specks where seeds should be, but they are not, thanks to some strange natural mutations ). The botanical definition of fruit also includes many of the things we think of as vegetables: not only tomatoes, but also eggplants, peppers, avocados, cucumbers, and pumpkins.
Please note that a fruit can also be a vegetable. You can pester your friends by saying, “Hey, did you know zucchini is a fruit?” and you will be right. But if you say, “The squash is actually a fruit, not a vegetable,” you are wrong, and they have the right to hit you. Both.
This is also fruit
Now it’s time for an advanced level of pedantry in fruits and vegetables: botanically, they are fruits, but that don’t fit our mental picture of something juicy with seeds inside.
If you think about it, there are seeds in a corncob : grains. Each nucleus is actually its own fruit. Do you know corn silk? Those annoying strands that stick out of your ear like a bun and get stuck in your teeth if you don’t brush them out? Each of them is a tunnel through which pollen travels from the outside world to a tiny tiny flower that becomes a grain of corn. If one of the strands is not pollinated, its nucleus will not develop, leaving something like an empty space on the corncob.
Beans and peas are also prepared from the fruit. Specifically, their pod is the fruit, while the beans or peas are the seeds inside.
Cereals , including rice, wheat, and oats, are also fruits. The skin of the fruit has grown together with the seeds, so there is no fleshy part in them, like a peach. Seed and fruit are basically the same thing. (The technical term for this is caryopsis .)
Nuts are fruits. Don’t believe me? Go find the tree on which the nuts are born. I have a black walnut in my yard. It produces green fruits, similar to a tennis ball, and inside the fruit there is a bone. The pit is actually a walnut in its shell .
Strawberry seeds are fruits. Each develops from a separate stamen (the female part of the flower) inside one multi-thousandth strawberry flower. The fruits ripen until a delicious drop of flesh grows from them, which holds them together. (Raspberries and blackberries are a similar package, but without the large edible drop in the middle.) In the kitchen, we call this red blob a fruit, but for nerds it is a “fleshy jar” or “extra fruit”.
Can I blow your mind? If you want to be really pedantic about berries , then these are fruits with a fleshy wall, seeds, but without a seed, which develop from one ovary. So, neither strawberry nor raspberry is a berry, and a tomato is a berry.