this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Fruit has a botanical and a culinary definition.
Vegetable only has a culinary definition.
Trying to decide on what food fits which category purely on the botanical definition of fruit is silly. In many other languages, the botanical and culinary definition even use completely different words. It's like saying lobster is red meat using a scientific definition of red.
But if we are having fun with this, rhubarb: definitely no fruit, but far too sweet, too often consumed raw or minimally processed, and far too at home in a yoghurt to fit nicely into the group vegetable.
Rhubarb’s just sour celery
Oh boy, another reason to hate rhubarb.
Also, you want a sweet vegetable? Sugar beet.
raw unprocessed sugar cane is delicious
THANK YOU
Well vegetable used to be used sometimes to mean "plant".
Most people don't really understand how words work.
It's fair enough to call things different to what that actually are. Vegetables in common language just means the stuff treated as vegetables in the kitchen. Calling all the things that are actually fruit fruit isn't really useful in the kitchen. I don't want tomato or pumpkin or cucumber in a fruit salad
Likewise with berries. Using the scientific names isn't useful in the kitchen, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries are all used similarly, despite only one of those is technically a berry
it becomes somewhat interesting when fruit is differently taxed then vegetables.
As was the case in a Supreme Court Ruling:
Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court unanimously held that tomatoes should be classified as vegetables rather than fruits for purposes of tariffs, imports and custom