I’m a little interested in why the distinction between fruits and vegetables were even made and I’m not smart enough to word it well enough for google. I know that one grows above ground and the other doesn’t, but does this sole difference actually make them different foods? Sort of like how a strawberry isn’t really a berry because of where it grows but does it have some extreme chemical makeup difference that leads it to be well…not a berry?
In: Earth Science
It depends on context.
Vegetable can mean plants & fungi, when distinguishing things in “animal, vegetable, or mineral”. But generally it’s a culinary term, meaning edible bits of plants (and fungi): roots, stems, leaves, and fruits.
As a botanical term, fruit means seed-bearing bits of plants.
As a culinary term, fruit means *sweet* seed-bearing bits.
So cucumbers, chiles, eggplant, etc. are botanically fruits, but culinary vegetables.
Tomatoes have the distinction of [being recognized as vegetables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden) by the US Supreme Court, in 1893.
There is no real distinction, because “fruit” is an actual scientific term, and “vegetable” is not.
A fruit is a **specific** kind of plant structure, a seed-bearing structure of a flowering plant formed from the plant’s ovary. a “berry” also has a strict definition (a fruit of a single flower ovary where the pericarp forms an edible flesh), and some of the things we call berries are not berries and things we do not call berries are berries. Strawberries do not from from a single ovary but a watermelon does.
A vegetable has no such definition, and is just pretty much “any part of any plant a person decided to eat”. Many things we treat as vegetables are fruit (tomato, bell pepper) but could also be roots, leaves, shoots, stems, buds, seed pods, etc
Explanation: so I’m not a horticulturist, and may have no idea what I’m talking about. Fruits grow above ground while vegetables grow below ground. The fruits are meant to distribute the seeds of the plant so the flowering process creates different nutrients, usually base on natural sugars. Vegetables are mostly roots, having a chemical structure meant to absorb more nutrients then distribute them. The difference between those two organic structures requires a different set of additives in the forms of vitamins and minerals, which humans need a variety of from both. Again could be wrong but that’s my understanding.
Fruits are biologically all organs that plants produce to ensure distribution of their seeds.
Culinary, the category of “vegetable” typically means some plant parts, of which some might or might not be biological fruit. So tomatoes are “vegetables” although they are fruits of tomato plants. They are mostly though not always used in savory dishes, or at least not deserts, though there is a tomato jam. So the distinction in culinary use is mostly convention – some true fruits will be culinary vegetables, but many other parts of the plant can be eaten and are not technically fruit are also considered vegetables, like leaves, stems and roots.
Fruits carry seeds, vegetables are anything else of the plant.
That’s the technical definition anyway. Due to how things are used when actually cooking, or nutritional differences some things may be classed as vegetables or fruits even if they are not technically that from a biology standpoint.
One common example is a tomato. Though biologically a tomato is a fruit, how it’s used in cooking is similar to a typical vegetable, and so when speaking legally, or in cooking tomatoes are classed as vegetables.
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