What is a Vegetable?

What's a Vegetable? 

What is a vegetable? I'm serious. Smarty-pants like to point out that tomatoes are a fruit, but so are eggplant and zucchini. If carrot is a root, and celery is a stem, broccoli is a flower, and yes, tomato is a fruit, then what exactly is a vegetable?

According to Wolfgang Stuppy, the research leader in Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew & Wakehurst Place: “the term vegetable doesn’t exist in botanical terminology.” Simple as that.

Veggies might not exist botanically, but they’re not going anywhere culturally. So we're back to square one: what’s a vegetable?

A quick flip through the dictionary is surprisingly unhelpful. The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is so broad as to include “any living organism that is not an animal.” Under these guidelines oak trees and hydrangeas could end up on our dinner plates. Less archaic definitions include words like “edible” and “savory.” Leading us back to well, vegetables.

As it turns out, when we’re drawing distinctions between vegetables and fruit, it's not a plant part’s botanical function that matters, but it’s culinary one. And any kid could tell you what’s what: vegetables are dinner and fruit is dessert. We knew it all along.

So why did we ask this unexpectedly complicated question? Right: tomatoes. Like many other savory vegetables, tomatoes are neither root, nor stalk, nor leaf, but—botanically speaking—fruit. And if you’re having a botanical discussion, that’s the word you should use. But if you’re in the kitchen, for the love of pizza call them vegetables.

Knowing the botanical purpose of all our vegetables can help us feel connected to our food, and grateful for it. But the next time some pseudo-smarty pants tells you that tomatoes are fruit... please let them know that strawberries are in fact a vegetable. 

Aubrey Yarbrough is the Community Development Manager for Farmer Mark. Before moving to LA she ran her own organic farm and cooked on the garde manger station of the award winning Elements restaurant in Princeton, NJ. She has contributed poetry to New American Writing and prose to Edible Jersey.