Cooking: Fruits and Vegetables (1)

Cycling to a meeting this morning I realised that the distinction between a fruit and a vegetable was not part of my education. An apple is a fruit and lettuce is a vegetable, is a strawberry a fruit? Strawberries sort of have the redness of an apple and the greenness of a lettuce. But there are strawberry milkshakes and banana milkshakes, so both must be fruit (for the ontology: fruit + milk = milkshake). After the traffic light turned from red to green, I realised there are also chocolate milkshakes, so chocolate is also a fruit by the same logic?

I checked wikipedia on both vegetable and fruit and am now very confused. The entries seem to suggest that a fruit is a vegetable. The wikipedia definition of vegetable is just plain weird:

Vegetable is a nutritional and culinary term denoting any part of a plant that is commonly consumed by humans as food, but is not regarded as a culinary fruit, nut, herb, or spice.

I think CZ has to come to the rescue ...

Comments

[Jack Vinson]

The fun with "fruit" is that it means slightly different things in different contexts. I believe that botanically, fruits are things that (grow out of flowers and) contain seeds for reproduction of the plant. This would include apples, and bananas; and tomatoes, squash, peppers, eggplant, avocados. Lots of "vegetables" seem to be fruits.

But in popular terms, the idea of fruit seems to be more limited.

[Anjo Anjewierden]

Jack: so fruit is not really well-defined?