My stubborn position is that all fruits are vegetables.
Anything that comes from a plant (vegetation) is a vegetable.
EDIT: Reading up on the case, they apparently didn’t treat fruits and vegetables as disjoint sets but rather with fruits as a subset of vegetables. So far, so good…
HOWEVER, they also apparently ruled that tomatoes don’t count as a fruit because they aren’t eaten for dessert…
Wow… just… wow.
Fruit is a scientific term. Vegetable is a culinary term.
Fruit is also a culinary term that is not identical to its meaning as a scientific term
That’s the one the SCOTUS used.
There we go. A tomato can be a fruit and not a fruit at the same time.
Oh cool, now we can namedrop Schrödinger into this to give an even more educated impression.
That only makes you seem educated to the uneducated
A real Kroger Dinner situation.
I love you.
As a former worker at a steel plant, I concur.
Underrated comment 👏
Care to explain to this poor guy?
Anything that comes from a plant is a vegetable
former worker at a steel plant concurs
Implying that steel workers are brainless
Thank you kind human
because they aren’t eaten for dessert
This sounds to me like a reasonable way to disqualify something as a culinary fruit.
Folks like to make a big hullabaloo about tomatoes being technically a fruit, but no one gives a second thought about referring to peppers, cucumbers, green beans, eggplant, avocado, pumpkins & other squash, or corn on-the-cob as vegetables even though they are all technically fruit.
And I was being picky there, because beans, peas, grains and nuts are all also technically fruit. Heck, lots of “nuts” like peanuts and cashews aren’t even really nuts.
Keep your taxonomy out of my kitchen:
- Fruit are sweet.
- Vegetables are not.
- Grains make bread.
- Herbs and spices add a lot of flavor with a little bit. Herbs are the green ones.
- nuts are. They just are. Don’t think about it too hard.
Fruit are sweet. Vegetables are not.
Carrots, caramelized onions?
Those fruits are of the devil and the less we speak of them the better
You know that caramelized onions don’t come from a plant?
Sugar beet
/s?
Fruits are edible seed pods. Nuts are inedible seed pods but have edible seeds.
Fruit makes wine.
Grain makes beer
Nuts in the right contexts make nougat, nut paste or babies.
Wait, you’ve found one! I consider peppers their own thing, culinarily speaking anyway, neither fruit nor vegetable.
The rest of your bullet points I basically agree with, but there’s also
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peppers are peppery, not always hot, red bell are sweet, and green bell tastes like feet.
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seeds are seedy, don’t think about the difference between them and nuts, some questions are not for mortal man.
Peppers are seasoning. ducks
You can season duck with peppers, sure. Seasoning is a verb, to season one uses herbs, spices, peppers, (or if we’re talking about cast iron, oil or wax.)
You don’t consider peppers spices? When something has a lot of pepper, wouldn’t you say it’s… spicy?
Riddle me that.
Red (or any) bell peppers, poblano peppers, banana peppers, Padrón peppers, cherry peppers, shishito peppers, habanada peppers, all peppers with no heat.
Furthermore “heat,” while commonly conflated with “spice,” is not “spice.” “Spices” are not necessarily “hot:”
Anise, allspice, cardamom, mustard seed, coriander, dill seed, clove, nutmeg, turmeric, saffron, vanilla, garlic, mace, sweet paprika, fennel, caraway, cumin, sumac, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and MORE!
are all not-hot spices. You have been riddled.
You missed a perfect opportunity to add the word picquant into the conversation.
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Hold the presses!! Americans don’t count avocados as fruit?!
Is that because they’ve never eaten a tree ripened avocado? It’s not sweet like a mango, but it’s sweet. Eat a green banana or strawberry and see if it’s sweet. That’s no way to tell the dessert potential of produce!
That could be part of it. Another part might be that many of us have only had experience with the Haas variety, if any. And then most likely as guacamole.
Fruit are sweet.
Counterpoint: Oranges, pineapples
Both of those are sweet and fruit…?
They are sour. Or tart, in case of pineapples.
You are buying shitty pineapple. To select a good pineapple:
Tug at the center most leaf on top of the fruit, it should give easily. It should smell like pineapple. The skin should be golden colored to slight green (sl underripe) or a very slight touch brown (overripe). The bottom should be dry. The very green ones that you can get for $2-3 never ripen properly as they were picked too early.
Informative.
Please change your username to ananasexpert.
As much as I love pineapple my username combines my love of The Mothman, the Mandelorean, And Back to the Future.
I am passionate about fruits and veggies and enjoy helping people discover how to pick good ones.
I want to try the pineapples you’re getting. Ours are sweet, but that’s about it.
You tartness and sweetness are two orthogonal axes. A fruit can be both quite tart and quite sweet, like some varieties of pineapple and cherry.
Lemons and limes were right there man, they were right there
They’re not fruits by culinary definition.
Unless you eat them like oranges?😯
In that case, seek help.
Edit: On a serious note, I guess this is cultural difference?
Lemons and limes are definitely fruits in my culinary culture. What are they in yours, if not fruits?
Vegetables in supporting roles I guess.
Those are incredibly sweet highly acidic foods. The acid is what balances the sweet.
That’s not really a stubborn position. That’s definitively true.
All fruits are vegetables; not all vegetables are fruit.
Vegetables aren’t actually a thing though. Just a bunch of things we grouped because we like eating them.
There’s no such thing as a fish
Yes there is. Taxonomists aren’t the only people who give meaning to words
“Taxonomists aren’t the only people who give meaning to words”
Eloquently put! You’ve expressed a feeling that I have had for a while now and couldn’t quite put into the appropriate words! Thanks 🙏🏼
Thx I was inspired by other comments here :D
Ok. I’m a fish.
True. They are just water based government drones, to keep tabs on the mermaid population
If there’s even a 1% chance Jason Momoa could go rouge we should treat it as an absolute certainty.
*within taxonomy, I think most people can conceive of a fish in colloquial terms.
Whales are taxonomically fish.
No??? They’re mammals, where did you pull this information out of?
All mammals are taxonomically fish. Perhaps even all chordates. YOU are a fish!
After this conversation, I wish I was.
What they are trying to say: One cannot taxonomically group every animal we consider fish without also including all the mammals and i think even reptiles and birds. that’s because there are multiple taxonomic branches of fish that split off of the trunk before our ancestors started to walk on land, and not all of the fish in our branch decided to go on land, and continued their own branch. therefore yes: whales are fish and so are you. what does this mean? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
it is technically correct which is, of course, the best kind of correct.
They are correct. You’re not wrong, whales are indeed mammals. But “fish” isn’t a monophyletic grouping, meaning you either need to give up on using it as a category or you need to correct it by including everyone sharing the same LCA, meaning mammals would be part of your “fish” grouping.
Of course, that’s how it works within biological classification. Colloquially, you can call them anything.
Just gonna copy paste what I told the other guy:
I understand that and completely agree, but comparing taxonomical categories with common categorizations such as “fish” is also missing a big point. You can make better comparisons to get people to understand that taxonomy is made up and not reliable to follow religiously, barely even works as a guideline
Like fish.
Botanically is there such thing as a “vegetable”?
VIC?!
Botanical vs culinary. Different contexts; different definition per context. There is not a problem here.
“Fruit” within culinary is usually applied to “sweeter” forms of fruits, and the more savory forms usually get called “vegetable” instead regardless of being botanically called fruits or not.
Tomatoes are sweet
It doesn’t matter why are you roleplaying as a botanist if you don’t see that culinary definitions and scientific classification are two separate things. One is really useless for the average person and the other is probably also a foreign concept to everyone having quirky discussions about whether cakes are hotdogs or smoothies, because they are the type of people to tweet a 60 page essay about why expecting neurodivergents people to cook their own meal should be considered a hate crime.
Tomatoes don’t belong in a fruit salad
What about cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes?
grape tomatoes
Do they make wine out of them?
I’m sure someone out there did.
whether or not cakes are hotdogs or smoothies,
Depends on the preparation, if blended with juice or yogurt: smoothie.
Yogurt would make it a lassi
Did you just assume its gender? It could be a laddie for all you know!
Stupid meme. Many other countries also classify tomatoes in with vegetables for various commerce regulation and taxation purposes. That case was just capitalists trying to get out of paying tariffs by nitpicking the definition of a tomato
I hate these things where people twist reality just so they can make a cute “Americans are so dumb” meme. If you want to bash the US, there are plenty of relevant topics to choose from for criticism. Better yet, read a book once in a while instead of just scrolling the internet and grabbing random shit that’s gone viral.
And BTW, what’s a fruit or vegetable is not some objective Sacred Truth that science “discovered”, it’s that science came up with a system of categorizing plants that people deemed to be useful for the study of Botany, just as legislators came up with a slightly different classification useful for taxation, and regular people also classify them in a way that’s useful for cooking purposes. This is not a situation where Science! is an almighty God. It’s just ways of sorting things. “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”
This made me chuckle more than it should have
And BTW, what’s a fruit or vegetable is not some objective Sacred Truth that science “discovered”, it’s that science came up with a system of categorizing plants that people deemed to be useful for the study of Botany,
It’s true that all biological classifications are just operational, they’re not some absolute natural truth or a fifth law of thermodynamics. However, the definition of “fruit” is also not some arbitrary malleable classification we randomly attach to plant anatomy based on how it looks. There are biological definitions that are indeed malleable in that way, this one isn’t.
Fruits are organs with a specific origin in the plant and with a very specific goal. Tomatoes are fruits, and there’s no system of definitions that could group them otherwise that wouldn’t either: contain contradictions or wrongful elements or be identical to the current definition of fruit. You could call them “blorgblurgs” but the elements in that group would be the same, because fruits are a specific part of a plant with actual reason behind the definition.
Because Fruits were taxed higher than vegetables, so importers started listing them as a vegetable.
It’s tax dodges all the way down.
I just looked it up and it was actually the opposite: vegetables were taxed and fruits were not. Then somebody argued that they shouldn’t have to pay and the court decided that yes, botanically speaking tomatoes are fruit, but in their ordinary meaning (which is used in commerce and trade) they are a vegetable. And that a tomato is used and prepared like a vegetable so it should be classified as that.
Vegetable isn’t even a botanical definition.
Just a list of items we normally think of as veggies, but actually fruit: cucumbers, squash, peppers, eggplants, avocados, pumpkins.
The real misconception is that people conflate culinary terms with biological terms.
Are actually fruit
No, they are culinary vegetables. They are also biological fruits. AFAIK “vegetable” does not even have meaning in biology
What’s the deal with the background? Screenshots aren’t what they used to be, back in my day the worst that could happen was for the image to turn into a pixelated mess after being re-uploaded 1000 times.
Now I sometimes see images getting tilted by 5%, random words crossed out in yellow, and whatever the fuck happened here.
Idk, I stole the meme from somewhere
Like when the state of Indiana [attempted to change] the definition of pi
Almost changed the definition of pi. It passed the House, but a professor from Purdue happened to be in the Statehouse on unrelated business the day the Senate voted on it. He managed to convince enough Senators that it was a terrible idea and they absolutely roasted it on the floor.
The Wikipedia article on it is great. “Legislative History” is the interesting bit. My favorite part is this:
An assemblyman handed [Prof. Waldo] the bill, offering to introduce him to the genius who wrote it. He declined, saying that he already met as many crazy people as he cared to.
“(…) he already met as many crazy people as he cared to.”
My spirit animal.
Very relatable
They’re also a Native American food that was made famous by Italians, celebrated by the Spanish, honoured by the French, used by the English and turned into Ketchup by the Americans … another bit of multicultural history of America.
Ketchupbased BBQ sauce*
Ya skipped a level.
Plus they make the national drink…ketchup.
So is ketchup technically a jam?
Yes according to the Dutch.
This leaves out the modern extension of this where pizza meets the requirements of a vegetable due to it containing 2 tablespoons of tomato paste as specified in the “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2012”, previously the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010”.
Thanks Obama
