How did certain types of berries like cucumbers and eggplants become classified as vegetables instead of fruits?
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A vegetable is just an edible part of the plant. A fruit is the part of the plant that contains seeds (or used to… See Bananas and seedless grapes). However, when you’re cooking, you use some fruits differently. This leads to Fruits being defined in a culinary or nutritional sense. When cooking, a cucumber has more in common with lettuce than an orange. So, from a culinary perspective, many fruits are treated like vegetables. Usually (but not always) a culinary fruit is sweet or sour. Vegetables tend to be more savory.
This gets messy with the FDA trying to classify things. So the fact that we use tomatoes, which nutritionally are fruits, like vegetables resulted in them classified as veggies, and pizza sauce being considered a vegetable in school lunches. It’s not perfect.
Fun fact though: there is one botanical vegetable (non fruit) classified as a culinary fruit: rhubarb!
And lastly, this nugget: knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting a tomato in a fruit salad.
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