Mad at Fruit

Free-form Friday

This may sound like an awesome realization brought on by ingesting recreational chemicals*, but have you ever realized that a lot of the things we call vegetables are in fact fruit?

Per Wikipedia, "In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds."

Culturally, we generally think of fruit as sweet. But botanically, much of what you put into your salad is fruit: tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, peas, beans, etc.

Roots (carrots, radishes, turnips, etc.), stalks (celery, rhubarb), and leaves (lettuce, spinach) are proper vegetables because they come from vegetative growth. But regardless of whether it's sweet, if it comes from a fruiting body, it's fruit.

This may be nothing more than the culinary equivalent of staring at a word until the letters look completely wrong, but it's enough to make you mad at fruit!

* Something, by the way, with which I have no first-hand experience.

Image: Photography by BJWOK / FreeDigitalPhotos.net