What determins what is a fruit and what is a vegetable. Someone once told me that a fruit has the seeds on the inside and a vegetable produces its seed on the outside. If that is the case, then a pickle is a fruit. Is there any truth to this?
This question comes up all the time here. The answer is that the terms can come from different realms so it isn’t even useful to treat it like something needs to be one or the other.
Vegetable is a culinary term and it simply refers to the parts of the plants that we eat that we don’t happen to call fruits as a culinary term.
Fruits do have a scientific definition as:
“The ripened ovary or ovaries of a seed-bearing plant, together with accessory parts, containing the seeds and occurring in a wide variety of forms.”
So is a tomato a fruit or vegetable?
It is both. It meets the scientific standard for a fruit and the culinary definition for a vegetable.
Many vegetables are fruits. It’s not an either-or thing.
The problem is that there are different definitions for each. A vegetable can be:
1: Anything that’s sort of like a plant, including fungi.
2: Any plant
3: Any specimen of 1 or 2 which is edible to humans
4: Any specimen of 3 which is primarily eaten in the main course of a meal rather than dessert
5: Any specimen of 4 which is low in carbohydrates
A fruit can be:
1: The reproductive body of any flowering plant
2: Any sweet edible plant part
So, for example, cucumbers, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and eggplants are all vegetables, by any definition. All of those are also fruits, by definition 1. Mushrooms and potatoes may or may not be vegetables, depending on what definition you use, and neither of those are fruits. Rhubarb and corn may or may not be vegetables, and may or may not be fruits, depending on what definitions you use.
It’s just as silly to ask “Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable” as it is to ask “Is lettuce a leaf or a vegetable”, or “Is a carrot a root or a vegetable”.