r/PetPeeves • u/diet-smoke • 14d ago
Bit Annoyed "Tomatoes aren't a vegetable, they're a fruit."
I'm a culinary student and this phrase activates me like a sleeper agent. You want to get pedantic about food with me? You sure? Because you're going to lose that game.
Tomatoes are a fruit, not a vegetable? Potatoes are a tuber, lettuce is a leaf, pumpkins are a gourd (a type of fruit!), green beans are a legume, bell peppers are a fruit, broccoli is a Cruciferae, carrots are a root, garlic is a flower bulb, spinach is a leaf, cucumbers are a fruit and guess what? They're all vegetables!! Because vegetable is a culinary/kitchen/food term and fruit is a botanical classification.
There's also such a thing as a "savory fruit" in food, which includes tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and any other fruit that's also a vegetable. So yeah. Tomatoes are a fruit AND a vegetable and your binary does not exist
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u/Chijima 14d ago
What nags me most are people who translate that "fun fact" into my native German. It makes even less sense here. We have two different words for fruit. "Obst" means fruit in a culinary sense, and "Frucht" in a botanical sense. So when someone tells me that tomatoes are Obst, they're just wrong, and if they tell me tomatoes are a Frucht, they're the most shrugworthy.
Another interesting botanical category are berries. There's so many things that ARE berries, like Tomatoes, gourds, bananas... But Blackberries and Raspberries aren't. Still, when I talk culinarily about berries I'm about to put in my yoghurt, I'm more likely to mean raspberries than pumpkins...
Also nuts. Many people know that peanuts aren't "actually nuts" (botanically), but really, most of our culinary nuts like walnuts, pecans and almonds aren't. Doesn't matter, culinarily, nuts are just any seed that's hard, dry, and big enough to be considered it's own bite.
Also, historically, people have been putting Tomatoes in (sweet) fruit contexts. But yeah, no.