While I was making lunch with a can of black beans, I noticed it had a slogan on the front, “The vegetable with more!”
Now ignoring for a moment that ‘with more what?’ thought that must jump into other heads as it did mine, a question popped up, 'beans are a vegetable?"
I was taught that vegetables are the root (like carrots), stem (like celery) or leaves (like lettuce) of a plant. And fruit is the ovaries and have seeds.
Beans don’t seem to fit into any of these categories. So was I taught wrong about the definition of vegetable? Are beans something else?
Beans are a vegetable in the casual culinary sense of the word, along with things like tomatos and cucumbers. This usage of vegetable has no (or very little) relationship to the use of vegetable in the botanical sense.
A vegetable is either a plant, the part of a plant that you eat, or a non-sweet part of plant that you eat. By any of those definitions, beans qualify. Some vegetables are roots, some vegetables are stems, some are leaves, and some are fruits. Some are in fact other parts of a plant entirely: Broccoli, for instance, is primarily flowers, and bulbs (onions and garlic) are more like stems than roots, but aren’t really either.
Yup - what they said. Essentially, there is little clear definition of what is and is not a veggie.
What constitutes a fruit, OTOH, is all about sex (botanically at least.)
Next thing you know you are going to ask us what constitutes a grain!
It depends on your definition of beans. If you are considering the entire vegetable, such as a runner bean then it is a vegetable. However, if you eat just the bean, as in kidney beans, then they are a pulse.
Well, if one were to employ the logic set forth in Nix v. Hedden (SCOTUS, 1893), beans would probably be considered vegetables regardless of their botanical classification.
Plant life as a whole is included in the vegetable kingdom, so all plants are vegetables in the biological sense (“Animal, mineral, or…”). All fruits are vegetables, then, or at least part of a vegetable; the same would seem to hold true for leaves, roots and seeds when we are speaking of “vegetables” meaning foods not animal in origin.
Why is this being danced around so? Beans are part of the fruit, or reproductive part of a plant. The non-reproductive parts are vegetables. In some contexts all parts of a plant are considered vegetable (as in animal, vegetable or mineral). But otherwise beans are fruit.
