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
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
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