this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Take a piece of paper with 3 squares drawn on it
And hand a person a picture of an apple, tomato, pepper, cucumber, pork cutlet, and mushroom and ask them to put the pictures into the squares and then label each square
Average person will definitely label a box as vegetables and put the mushrooms in it
Well if you tell me to use only three categories and one of them will obviously be "meat", then I won't put them with apples.
One box labeled "Brown when cooked properly". Then mushrooms can go in the box with the apples and cutlets.
That sign can't stop me because I can't cook (let alone properly).
Box labeled "burnt to a crisp" and put everything in it.
Apple, tomato, peppers, and cucumbers are all fruits
Mushrooms are mushrooms
Pork is meat
But if you give the average person those it’s much more likely they will make the categories fruits, vegetables, and meat and put mushrooms in the vegetable category
Why are we starting this scenario with the arbitrary restriction of 3? Yes, if you give people any number of items and tell them there is a finite number of categories, they were will find a way to divide those items into three. That doesn't mean they wouldn't come up with a more compelling argument for their choices when told to divide into 4 groups.
At no point have our options ever only been "fruit or vegetable," but yeah I guess if you tell people those are their only choices of course they'll adhere. But like... I've never known anyone who though those were the only choices?
The point is that may people will instinctually call mushrooms a vegetable
If we take that same example and add 4 categories and then add milk as another item I am still willing to bet the average person will put mushrooms as a vegetable and make the categories fruit vegetable dairy meat even though vegetables aren’t real and you could have a category of animal products.
Now if you only quiz the biology majors you might get a different result but in the U.S. only 38% of people are college educated and the most common major is business
I have no college credits and I would never call a mushroom a vegetable