Tomato: fruit or vegetable?

A tomato is

  • Total voters
    15
Just because it is a fruit does not mean it is not a vegetable.

Vegetable - A plant cultivated for an edible part, such as the root of the beet, the leaf of spinach, or the flower buds of broccoli or cauliflower.
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it's obviously a vegetable. it's strange that so many people have chosen the wrong answer.

here's the difference between fruits and vegetables: fruits taste sweet and vegetables don't. a tomato doesn't taste sweet so it's not a fruit.
 
S.A.M. said:
Vegetable is a traditional term, not a scientific one.
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So are you asserting that categories actually exist. What are these categories made of? Are categories made of matter? Energy?

A tomato is a tomato.

And different people, each with their own traditions, hallucinate categories for various practical and impractical reasons - in this case both categorizations are practical.
 
Simon Anders said:
So are you asserting that categories actually exist. What are these categories made of? Are categories made of matter? Energy?

A tomato is a tomato.

And different people, each with their own traditions, hallucinate categories for various practical and impractical reasons - in this case both categorizations are practical.
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Humans impose patterns on everything they see, based on subjective evaluations and categorisations.
 
S.A.M. said:
Humans impose patterns on everything they see, based on subjective evaluations and categorisations.
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Excellent rewording of my position. Hence the only thing we can say for sure is that a Tomato is a tomato. 'Is' as in =. Once we use 'is' as 'belongs to the set' we are now talking about culture and not nature.

If we are precise and say that tomatoes are like peaches because they both have seeds.

That is just peachy.
 
Steve100 said:
So for the purpose of this forum nothing is a vegetable?
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Biologically speaking, there is nothing that is defined as a vegetable. Generally speaking, a vegetable is the edible portion of a plant and may include fruits. The designation of fruits as fruits or vegetables is arbitrary and correlates with sweetness.
 
S.A.M. said:
Biologically speaking, there is nothing that is defined as a vegetable. Generally speaking, a vegetable is the edible portion of a plant and may include fruits. The designation of fruits as fruits or vegetables is arbitrary and correlates with sweetness.
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So what is the whole point of this thread?
Why didn't you just say
"Biologically speaking, there is nothing that is defined as a vegetable. Therefore a tomato is a fruit."?
 
While the simple answer is fruit there is the perspective that we treat it like a vegetable in a lot of our cooking. Therefore to a chef, perhaps we could consider it a vegetable-like fruit, but genetically, biologically it is a fruit.
 
Enmos said:
Cucumbers are fruit..
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Not in my book, but there is an idea for the next thread...

hehe, I just looked it up in Wiki, I guess it is the same as for the tomato:

"Though it technically is a fruit, cucumbers are widely considered vegetables." just as Kadark said...

here is a way to decide: Do you eat it by itself, without putting anything on it?
 
Its a veggie, but only because its what I was raised to think. I don't care about the issue enough to change that way of thinking.

Seriously, who cares? Doesn't change how it tastes or how much it costs.
 
"Botanically, a tomato is the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant: therefore it is a fruit or, more precisely, a berry. However, the tomato is not as sweet as those foodstuffs usually called fruits and, from a culinary standpoint, it is typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, as are vegetables, rather than at dessert in the case of most fruits. As noted above, the term "vegetable" has no botanical meaning and is purely a culinary term."

So it can be both... :)

"Due to the scientific definition of a fruit, the tomato remains a fruit when not dealing with US tariffs. Nor is it the only culinary vegetable that is a botanical fruit: eggplants, cucumbers, and squashes of all kinds (such as zucchini and pumpkins) share the same ambiguity."
 
Apples are fruit, Tomatoes were originally called "Love Apples" so that's one other reason to classify it as fruit. (along with the conventional point that it's a seed pod with a fleshy container)
 
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