Fruit or vegetable?

Growing up I learned that a tomato was a vegetable. Then in college, and since, I sometimes hear conversations where people give a scientific sounding definition that make tomatoes clearly a fruit. But they aren't sweet like most of my favorite fruits and I eat them in different ways. For this week, I decided to get to the bottom of the fruit/vegetable debate.

It didn't take much research to sort through the ins and out of my questions, but I love this fact I found. The question of whether a tomato is a fruit or veggie actually found its way into the supreme court in 1893. Yes, it's true. They ruled that for taxation purposes, a tomato is a vegetable. But they did recognize that botanically, it is a fruit.

Most of the confusion comes from the words fruit and vegetable and how they are used. Fruit is scientific word referring to the ripened ovaries of plant, which includes seed. In that sense, pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, walnuts, as well as plums, apples and oranges are all fruits. The term vegetable has no place in the field of botany. It simply refers to the part of a plant that can be eaten. Examples include roots (carrots), leaves (lettuce), stems (asparagus), seeds (corn), bulbs (garlic), and flowers(broccoli). So a plant can be both a fruit and vegetable in the normal world.

The culinary world has added to the confusion with their own definitions. For cooking, plant parts used in savory(saltier) dishes are vegetables. Plant parts used to add sweetness are fruits. I think I grew up using the culinary definitions.

And mushrooms, well. scientifically speaking they are fungi. But commerce and cooks classify them as vegetables.

Regardless of the term, none of the seven of my friends who took my survey(thanks!) regularly eat enough fruit or veggies. The CDC used to recommend 5 servings a day as minimum. Now they have a cool new campaign where you go to their website and can use a calculator to determine what you need. It says I need 1.5 cups of fruit and 2.5 cups of vegetables a day. Then it directs you to parts of the website that show you how to accomplish that. For fun, I entered my dad's stats too. He needs 2 cups of fruit and 3 cups of vegetables. Of course, they didn't define fruit or veggie. But check it out anyway, it's fun and it might inspire you.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable,
http://www.sciencebob.com/questions/q-tomato_fruit_vegetable.php.Photo from www.freephoto.com