Tomatoes, berries, fruits, and vegetables - discuss!

Zach Weinersmith’s work is awesome.

I also love this classic from him:

I feel like I am approaching the first ‘red line’ portion of the climb.

(I wonder how most IDers feel?)

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Now I don’t know much about quantum physics, BUT tomato jam exists and lettuce jam does not. You tell me which is the fruit!

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Tomato jam is delicious! Haven’t seen it for a while. Used to buy it at farm stalls when I was a child.

@broacher how long were you on iNat …3 … 2 …1 before you realised you were sliding down the far side of Mount Stupid. And then I realise that is more Valley of a Thousand Hills. I be always sliding down the far side of the next hill.

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‘k … Fruits bear plants’ seeds. :avocado: Thus, tomato, cucumber, bell pepper, etc. are fruits. Lettuces are leaves, celery is a stalk, carrot is a root, an’ so forth. (I know nothing about quantum physics :roll_eyes:)

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This might be the right time to drop this meme here:

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I think I’m still ascending mount stupid. I’m still a bit confused when it’s a fruit vs. berry vs. vegetable for some Solanaceae, for example Goldenberry (Physalis peruviana), which is called a berry, but as a food would probably be described as a fruit.

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Imo it’s too small to be called fruit.

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I agree, the ones I’m growing are maybe 7-10 mm in size when ripe, but I’ve seen this commercial cultivar which has berries 15-20 mm, similar to small salad tomatoes.

I recently found out that some people make salsa, normally made with tomato, chili, onion, and cilantro with Black Nightshade (Solanum nigrum) instead of tomato which seems like an exercise in patience since berries are 4-6 mm. Does this make it a vegetable?

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I doubt it, they look like typical berries and it’s normal to use berries in sauses, like cranberries.

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Nope.

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If we’re talking small fruits, meet chile piquin and chiltepin peppers, yummy!


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If it’s a seed producing structure, I believe botanists would consider it a fruit. Even berries​:blueberries:. Even corn.:corn: Even bananas​:banana:, though the seeds are quite rudimentary.

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Vegetable is a human food term, not botanical.
Cauliflower and broccoli are edible flowers that we call vegetables.

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In fact, the tiny brown dots we see in a banana aren’t the seeds, modern bananas are seedless. This has been achieved through selective breeding and hybridization; wild original bananas do have seeds (very big seeds in fact).

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Exactly.

Here in the US, it is also a legal term because there is a 10% tax on imported vegetables, but not on imported fruits. So the Supreme Court had to weigh in on the matter and decided that for tax purposes tomatoes and other related fruits are veggies. Botanically speaking, tomatoes (as well as cucumbers, squash, peppers etc.) are berries, a type of fleshy fruit with multiple seeds inside.

Also, to get back to sharing comics (my apologies if this has popped up before, I didn’t scroll all the way back through this thread to check), here’s one somewhat related to the topic.

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Botanically, a berry is just just a specific type of fruit. A berry is a fleshy fruit derived from one ovule but containing many seeds. If there’s only one seed, that’s a drupe (like a peach) and I could go on about other types but clearly we are off topic here :sweat_smile:

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Exactly!!!

All the discussion about berries reminded me of this:


Parody of a popular breakfast cereal found in the US.

Avacado (Persea americana) is a berry, not a drupe? :thinking:

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Yes, avocado is a drupe and whether it also is a berry depends on who you ask. Some botany resources treat drupes as a subtype of berry, others (including the key we use in botany lab) use number of seeds as a way to clearly separate drupes (single seed) and berries (multiple seeds) into two groups. Similarly with pomes - some texts treat them as a type of berry, others have them separately as an accessory fruit (based on fleshy receptacle surrounding an inferior ovary). Some split out hesperidium (citrus) and pepo (squash, cucumber etc) from the rest of the berries.

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