Tomatoes, berries, fruits, and vegetables - discuss!

I feel like this would fit in there too:

  • Inch worms aren’t actually worms. They are caterpillars.
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Sadly, they are not called 25.4 mm worms either. Thankfully, the Metric Paper Wasp (Polistes metricus) has adopted using SI units, but Imperial Moths (Eacles) still prefer inches.

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#pepperporn

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Plenty of fish like this too! There are far too many to list, so here’s just a small selection.

Eastern Blue Groper - actually a wrasse, not a grouper
Potato Cod - actually a grouper, not a cod
Fire Goby - a dartfish, not a goby
Scooter Blenny - a dragonet, not a blenny
Barramundi Cod - neither a barramundi nor a cod! it’s a grouper
Red Bass - a snapper, not a bass
Blue Cod - a sandperch, not a cod
Sleepy Cod - a sleeper goby, not a cod
Leopard Coral Trout - a grouper, not a trout
Shovelnose Shark - a guitarfish (a type of ray), not a shark
Australian Ghostshark - a chimaera, not a shark
Barber Perch - an anthias, not a perch
Magpie Perch - a morwong, not a perch
Crested Morwong - a trumpeter, not a morwong
Netted Morwong - a sweetlips, not a morwong
Murray Cod - a temperate perch, not a cod
Clown Knifefish - a featherback, not a knifefish
Electric Eel - a knifefish, not an eel
Chilean Seabass - a toothfish, not a seabass

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This came up recently among my friends, and I finally convinced them that tomato’s are good in fruit salads

as long as the other fruits are cucumbers and peppers…

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I’ve had really sweet cherry tomatoes in fruit salads before than they were good.

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Oh, I like that idea of a “botanical” fruit salad for the next departmental gathering. Might be a good conversation starter with incoming students to get them interesting in botany. Tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, maybe sugar snap peas and corn? That does actually sound like it could be made quite tasty.

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Don’t forget to add avocado.

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Great idea! I see some yummy-looking recipes out there for creamy avocado-lemon/lime salad dressings…

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:yum: :yum: :yum: :yum: :yum:

b) Blueberry and d) Hazelnut I think.

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Or walnut?

EDIT: I JUST FIGURED OUT WALNUTS ARE DRUPES.

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The mushroom’s embarrassed that it looks like Squidward.

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The confusing part is that there are fruits which I think should be drupes (one large seed in the center), which are actually considered to be berries. Chayote. How is chayote a berry when it has just the one big seed?

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I must say I am not one to be able to tell you the differentiating factors between fruit and vegetable but I think there is no way a Tomato is not a vegetable.

I think that in common use, outside of botany, the distinction is blurred. Sometimes you’ll hear the term “culinary fruit” when the object is actually a vegetable and similarly “culinary vegetable”, “culinary nut”, “tree nut” etc. If something comes from a flower it’s, in very broad terms, a “culinary fruit” (so a tomato would be a fruit). If something comes from a non-reproductive part of the plant (e.g. a leaf or stem) it’s a, generally, a vegetable but if unsure just throw the term culinary in before it. But then things confusing with things like tubers. So, again, culinary vegetable (or fruit)… can’t go wrong then :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_fruits

(From the Wikipedia link: " Many edible plant parts that are true fruits botanically speaking, are not considered culinary fruits. They are classified as vegetables in the culinary sense (for example: the tomato, zucchini, and so on), and hence they do not appear in this list.")

… and culinarily it’s a squash. I was in Oaxaca and we had white chayote that were prepared like twice baked potatoes (cooked once, mashed with queso fresco and herbs, then baked in their hollowed-out peels). One of the best things I tasted there.

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My efforts to go through records of herps in Texas and surrounding states has me feeling like I fell off Mt. Stupid and into the Valley of Confusion :)

I’ve been doing a lot of turtle and have started on amphibian records and it’s reinforcing how damn hard ID’s can be and how confusing identifying markers can be (I gave up on Plestidon-counting labial scales from photos is awful).

If tomato is a fruit, do bloody marys count as a fruit drink? Cause I think I’m going to go have one

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In botany class, we would call it a drupe. I’ve seen some books call all drupes one-seeded berries though so I guess it depends on how you define these terms.

Yes, they are. And so are pistachios and some other things that people usually consider nuts. :-)

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Rather than try to decide if something is a fruit or a vegetable, what we should focus is definitions. First define the word, and then see if the thing fits the definition, and also bear in mind that different groups will define things in different ways.
To take a non-related example, we can argue indefinitely over whether Pluto is a planet or not. Some will say that it had been a planet for years, so why change it? But that isn’t defining what a planet is. A planet used to be defined as something that “wandered” - and didn’t fit the movement of the heavens. Then we figured out that this “wandering” was just movement around the sun within our solar system, so we defined a planet as something that moved around the sun. Then with our ever-more-powerful telescopes we discovered there were many hundreds of things orbiting the sun, some even bigger than Pluto, and there should be some size cutoff for what a planet is (which seems arbitrary to me, but I don’t know how they determined it). But with that latest definition, Pluto got chopped.

So how are we defining fruit? Seems like most of the human world defines it by edibility and sugar content, which is not necessarily wrong. The botanical definition is not wrong either… there really isn’t a wrong. Just be aware of your audience and context, and be flexible with how others might define things.

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