Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. Mark Twain
He wasn’t wrong, according to Brittanica. Cauliflower and cabbage are in the same family. Further, cauliflower is considered to be a domesticated version of cabbage. That conjures visions of cabbage heads marauding among the scallions, but I digress. While thousands of families consume what they think are vegetables every day, those servings may be fruit. Or something else. And it’s all due to unexpected botanical naming conventions.
Let's start with fruit. How is it defined?
Most people think that if the edible produce is sweet, it’s a fruit. Not so fast. There’s a scientific naming convention; we are not allowed to choose by flavor. Fine Dining explains traits to consider and one is whether there are seeds. If so, it’s a fruit. Well, it isn’t a vegetable if it has seeds. It might be something else. Read on.
Vegetables must be either the “root, stem or leaf of a plant.” So rhubarb is a vegetable. No, it isn’t sweet, but people make pies with it. Why? I know not. Botanically speaking, corn and zucchini are fruits because they develop from the flower of the plant. That one hurts my head. Why isn’t corn a grain? Wait. The USDA says that corn is a vegetable (well, that’s how we think of it) if consumed before it is dried. Post drying–as corn meal–it’s a grain. Confused yet?
More naming weirdness that will make you critical of menus. Or me.
We will never know how the botanical terms became immaterial when it came to placing certain foods on the table. From what I have read in the Fine Dining article (including its video), categories are determined by anatomy, if you will. Seems odd to us non-botanists, I suppose, but our (my) ignorance doesn’t negate the facts.
- Grapes, bananas, and bell peppers are berries. I know.
- Strawberries are not berries. Well, not the red part, which Fine Dining calls a fleshy receptacle. According to Eating Well they are aggregate fruits, but the fruit part is what we call the seeds; those are technically achenes.
- Raspberries and blackberries are aggregate fruits. But you can see why, yes?
- Nuts are fruit. Mostly.
- Pecans and walnuts are drupes. So are peaches and some other “fruits.”
- Mushrooms are neither fruit nor vegetable because they aren’t considered plants.
Does botanical naming mean anything, practically speaking?
The information shared here changes nothing for me. Certainly, none of it will impact my menus. The dichotomy between our naming of foods and the botanical labels intrigues me, though. And, like my post on food photography, it makes me consider, once again, how much of what I think I know is factual. Why do I, and others, function with such certitude? How many reminders do we need to convince us that we always have more to learn and that it can be foolish to have too much faith in what we think we know? Or, according to Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Always enjoy your blogs, even when they attempt to make my head hurt. I have mastered semantics for myself and that is all that is important. Food is either meat or not meat or bread. The word is not the thing. If I want to eat an ear of corn and call it a pork chop, I will do that. If that makes people crazy, all the better.
Ah. Thank you for another idea. Oddities – meat edition. 😂