Pumpkins: Fruit or vegetable?

It’s both a floor wax and a dessert topping!

Chinese winter melon is usually cooked…ditto nara melon.

Putting lettuce in soup at the last minute is very nice. Although escarole is more traditional.

Vegetables do not have seeds. Corn is not a vegetable. Cucumbers are, though.

It’s a kind of squash and thus a vegetable either way to me; in a pie it’s just got a lot of sugar to try to fool me into thinking it’s a fruit. But it’s still a veggie, dammit!

Green peppers, eggplants, green beans, zuchinni, and snow peas aren’t vegetables?

What is corn? A fruit?

Corn is a grain.
And green peppers: fuck that poison.

I’d have written this had I been the first respondent to the OP.

In the botanical sense, i. e. the scientific sense, the part of the plant that holds the seeds is the fruit (I don’t know enough about this part of science to know - does it have to be fleshy? Is the shell of a walnut a fruit? ) Thus, pumpkins are fruit, but so are tomatoes, okra, cucumbers and avocados. And carrots are roots, spinach is leaves, and broccoli is stalks and buds.

The culinary sense is more about common usage (and how they end up grouped in the grocery store). In general (there’s always an exception), vegetables are served as a savory dish with the main part of the meal, whereas fruit are served as part of a sweet dessert or a sweet snack.

But mostly the division is about what you grew up with.

Thus, apples are fruit but tomatoes are vegetables. Because that’s what you grow up with, until you get a pedantic teacher who insists that tomatoes are fruit because only science matters. Yum, tomato cobbler.

Now we get to pumpkins. I have always considered pumpkins fruit, because pumpkin based dishes are always sweet around here. And I thought that was true for everyone but then I noticed that Brits call them vegetables, and then I found Americans that call them vegetables. Apparently, I’m in the minority.

Pumpkin is a fungus, closely related to truffles.

That still includes carrots, beets, and onions.

And where does that leave quince?

Where’s the option for “Devil’s Fruit?”

I freaking HATE pumpkin and pumpkin spiced anything.

Had you a walnut tree, you would know. Walnut fruit is a drupe. To the best of my knowledge, it is not edible, and if you neglect the tree’s leavings, the fruit will become a vile black slime on the ground by late fall.

I never really thought of any of those as particularly sweet (they have about half the sugar of an equivalent amount of apple, pear, banana, or orange, although beets can get close). I’ve never heard anyone bite into a carrot and say “my, that’s a sweet carrot!” But, then again, we have sour fruits that have less sugar than those veggies, like lemon and lime, that we definitely consider those fruits, so sweetness isn’t the sole factor (but it does seem to be the most obvious one.)

what do you call my aunts accidental mutant cross between a spaghetti squash and a pumpkin …

Of course carrots are sweet, hence carrot cake.

I think there are – or were; numerous breeds eaten by precolumbians are now extinct – sweet pumpkins. Some really old colonial-era pumpkin recipes are desserts that don’t call for any sweetener at all.

But there’s also zucchini cake, and I don’t think of zucchini as sweet. But, then again, you do have sweet potatoes, which I do find cross into the “sweet” category per my tastes on their own. And probably sweetcorn, too. I mean, yes, carrots are sweet for vegetables, but there’s something else going on there that either tempers the sweetness for me or doesn’t make me think of them as “sweet,” even though I do understand how some people label them as such.

No, the walnut is the seed, there’sa fruitaround that. Like eschereal said, it’s a drupe, or stone fruit - think of the walnut as like a peach pit or cherry stone.

So basically the shell around the walnut is the same as the skin on an apple seed, effectively considered part of the seed.