The Current Events Thread

[Kamak]

Don't you mean culinary?

If not, can you give me a source or something, I'd like to know how tomato differs nutritionally from other fruits.

Well, it's considered a vegetable in culinary because of the nutrients and flavors present inside the tomato (similar to why peppers are considered vegetables along with gourds and squashes, even though they're botantically considered fruit (even more specifically, berries)).

It's something I learned in my culinary class, so I'll have to look and see if I can find the information, but generally the main criteria used for fruit vs. vegetable (for botanical fruits) is based on the sugar content of the flesh of the fruit. Tomatoes have a much lower sugar content than most fruits, therefore, it is treated like a vegetable.

However, out of the botanical fruits that are culinary vegetables (tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers, eggplants, etc.), tomatoes are the only ones (though I think peppers might as well) that are considered fruits when being canned, because the acidity of the tomato requires a different canning method.

So tomatoes are a bit weird, to say the least.

EDIT: daisies it Exeres. :U

And actually, I prefer to tell people that tomatoes are berries when people try to argue the fruit vs. vegetable problem. It always gets weird looks (even though it's correct).

[Syobon]

Are nuts considered fruits or vegetables in this classification?

[Exeres]

Botanically, a nut is a dry fruit with a single seed that becomes hard as it matures.

For culinary purposes, nuts are pretty much any seed, even if it's not botanically a true nut.

Fun fact: Peanuts are actually legumes, or beans.

[Kamak]

Botanically, a nut is a dry fruit with a single seed that becomes hard as it matures.

For culinary purposes, nuts are pretty much any seed, even if it's not botanically a true nut.

Fun fact: Peanuts are actually legumes, or beans.

the main distinction for legumes, follicles, capsules, and nuts is seed dispersal. The nut itself retains the seed (meaning it's not dispersed), while in legumes, the outer tissue splits on both sides to disperse the seeds inside (that's why peanut shells split fairly cleanly in two when you put pressure on them). A follicle splits on one side (think like a coin purse), and the seeds usually disperse like dandelion seeds (with hairs that catch the wind). And capsules have multiple pores with seeds in them that open to disperse a single seed per pore (bristlenuts are the go to to understand this).

To make this even more complicated achenes (like sunflower seeds) have an outer coating that would normally be expected to split open and disperse the inner seed, but they don't. Instead, the seed grows and forces it's way out of the protective coat.

Then you have grains (like rice), samara (achenes with a little "wing" at the end of the seed), and aggregates (like raspberries (which despite their names are NOT berries) and corn (aggregates are single flowers with multiple carpels that results in multiple fruits all mushed together into a "super fruit", so the hair on the corn? Those are carpels. Each little nub is both considered a fruit AND a fruitlet and the nubs can even occasionally be called berries, even though the super fruit is NOT a berry)), making for a very screwed up way of thinking.

Strangely, corn is considered a vegetable in culinary even though it has a high sugar content. Dunno why that is, but maybe it has to do with the fact that corn kernels are occasionally considered grains.

And all of these groups EXCEPT aggregate fruits, are considered berries.

[Exeres]

Because corn is definitely undeniably a seed, and it is still cooked as a vegetable, rather than as a fruit.

Could you imagine corn pies, corn cobbler, and corn yogurt?

[The Idiotic Oracle]

i want a corn pie


oh wait

[Stranaton]

is this really a discussion of semantics?

[Exeres]

No, it's a discussion about the difference between botanical and culinary definitions.

[Stranaton]

but why does it matter? USDA already ignores most past "rules" on what a fruit is. what really matters is grouping the food on what nutrients they provide (opinion).

[Exeres]

Well it was an interesting discussion and I was actually kind of having fun going and looking up information to share...

but why does it matter?

I'll guess I'll just go back to looking at stupid pictures on imgur.

[Kamak]

but why does it matter? USDA already ignores most past "rules" on what a fruit is. what really matters is grouping the food on what nutrients they provide (opinion).

Because while the "USDA" and other nutritional/culinary groups sort fruits by their nutrients, botanists define them by their modes of dispersal, what kinds of tissues they're made of, whether they're the product of one or more flowers/carpels, and even what specialized defense mechanisms are developed (spikes in capsules, rinds in pepos (watermelons), capsaicin in peppers, and citric acid in hesperidiums (citris fruits)). The way botanists group them also helps understand the phylogeny (family tree) of different angiosperms (flowering (and therefore fruiting) species of plants).

So yeah, the botanical classification of fruits is kind of a big deal, especially when it helps in things like genetic engineering to get bigger and better fruit, which means a higher quality item to be used for cooking food.

[Brekkjern]

If it didn't matter we wouldn't be making these categories and we could just go back to debating if it is pronounced /təˈmɑːtoʊ/ (tə-mah-toh) or /təˈmeɪtoʊ/ (tə-may-toh).

Yes, I copied that from Wikipedia.

[Stranaton]

but why even break it into "fruit" and "vegetable"?
each defining quality has exceptions, and they have already poked around in cross breeding the two.

[Brekkjern]

Because it is easier to remember the exceptions than making several new categories to contain them.

[Kamak]

but why even break it into "fruit" and "vegetable"?
each defining quality has exceptions, and they have already poked around in cross breeding the two.

Because, botanically speaking, vegetables are considered "any part of the plant that isn't a fruit".

so stems (celery), leaves (lettuce), flowers (broccoli), and roots (onions, potatoes, carrots, etc.) are vegetables.

So you can't cross breed a vegetable with a fruit. A fruit is the fertilized ovarian tissue of a plant that surrounds the seed. The vegetative part of a plant has no direct part in the reproduction of the plant, and beyond that, a fruit is the product of fertilization, so trying to breed a fruit with a vegetable would be like trying to mate a chicken thigh with an egg.

You could, however, potentially breed a lettuce plant with an apple plant, but then you're dealing with hybridization and there's a whole can of worms opened by doing that (namely pre-zygotic and post-zygotic barriers that either prevent hybrids from being made or prevents them from surviving/being fertile to pass on their unique genes). But even so, that's hybridization of plant species, not cross breeding a fruit with a vegetable. If you succeeded, you wouldn't have lettuce that tastes like apples or apples that taste like lettuce, but you'd probably have something like a lettuce plant that is capable of growing apple-like fruit or an apple tree that has lettuce-like leaves (it all depends on the hybrid).

So the actual fruits and vegetables wouldn't even be mashed up, they'd just be both present in some form on the resulting hybrid.

Though, I think this is going to be more confusing than helpful... :/

Because it is easier to remember the exceptions than making several new categories to contain them.

There really aren't any exceptions to the classifications. The only issue here is that culinary fields use a different classification method than botany. Both methods are equally valid because they fulfill different needs (classifying fruits and vegetables by taste and nutrients vs. classifying them by what part of the plant they come from). Neither classification is "wrong", but they do disagree fundamentally on a few ideas of classification.