Eating the necessary amount of vegetables for a balanced diet can be a daunting task — especially if you don’t know what actually qualifies as a “vegetable.” Vegetables do not constitute a distinct category of plant life separate from fruits; rather, fruits are actually a specific type of vegetable life. How we classify fruits overlaps with foods we perceive as vegetables, making the entire system more difficult to define. But before picky eaters try to talk themselves out of eating their greens, let it be known: the plants’ nutritional value is very much real — it’s the distinction that’s fabricated.
To fully understand why there is no straightforward classification, we need to get to the root of the issue. Welcome to your crash course in horticulture and botany. By basic definition, a vegetable is any edible part of an herbaceous plant — specifically the leaf, stem, or root, eaten as part of a meal. Another key aspect of the definition is that vegetables are generally part of a savory dish rather than a sweet one. In our current perception of vegetables, we classify them by the part of the plant we eat — root vegetables like carrots and potatoes, or leafy greens like collards and mustard greens. But what are they really?
You have to understand fruits to understand vegetables
While vegetables are technically the umbrella category for all edible plant life, fruits are much easier to classify. A fruit is the fleshy or ripened ovary of a plant, containing enclosed seeds for further reproduction. Botanically, it is the developed ovary — the part of the plant that blooms. Fruits are further classified by the type of flower or ovary they develop from, as well as by their dryness or fleshiness. Some fruits can even reproduce on their own. By this standard, legumes, nuts, carrots, squash, cabbage, peaches, cherries, cucumbers, and tomatoes are all, technically, varying types of fruit. In this light, ketchup is essentially a fruit smoothie, and an Indonesian Gado-Gado salad is, in reality, a fruit salad with hard-boiled eggs. Have fun with those nightmares.
As a matter of colloquial consensus, we have accepted that the parts of plants best enjoyed in savory dishes — whether roasted to perfection or sauteed — will be considered vegetables. Granted, having a distinction between fruits and vegetables makes it much easier than simply telling people to “just eat plants.” Otherwise, we’d be left with, “But not those — those are fine, but not that part of it. Well, that part is actually fine if you cook it long enough. Cooking that one is bad.” It can get confusing. What’s that saying? Knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are fruits; wisdom is refraining from adding them to fruit salads. It all makes sense now.
The Supreme Court got involved in the debate
Settling the distinctions between fruits and vegetables has been such a struggle that the Supreme Court presided over a case debating the topic back in 1893. The issue revolved around tariffs — specifically, merchants being required to pay a tax on vegetables, but not on certain fruits. Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, a vendor was able to avoid paying taxes on imported tomatoes, which, by botanical definition, were considered fruits because they contain seeds. The case hinged on definitions from dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster’s and Worcester’s, cross-referenced with the testimony of two witnesses with decades of experience selling both fruits and vegetables.
The judges ruled that common knowledge of plants — and how those plants are used — would determine whether they were classified as vegetables, while botanical and dictionary definitions would merely serve to guide public perception. That ruling remains the basis for how the USDA categorizes certain fruits, such as tomatoes and avocados, as vegetables: Botanical fruits that are sweet or tart fall under the fruit food group, while botanical fruits that are not sweet are classified as vegetables. There you have it. Some say potato, some say pedantic.
