All fruits are vegetables.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Tomatoes are biologically fruit, but culinarily they are a vegetable.
You wouldn't expect them to put an orange slice on your burger because you asked for some veg, would you? But you'd expect tomatoes, tomatoes are veg outside of any scientific context. Language is fickle. Life is complicated. Reality defies categorization.
fucking fucking
The fucking mushrooms.
What? Who’s calling pumpkins, squashes, and cucumbers vegetables?
And no one calls mushrooms vegetables: mushrooms are mushrooms.
"Vegetable" is a culinary term. It does not mean "plant", it is not the opposite of the botanical "fruit". It means "We use this in culinary traditions similarly to other vegetables".
Pumpkin, Squash and Mushrooms all fit into soup and not into fruit salads, so they're all vegetables. Cucumbers are veggies for fitting into actual salads, though they're only like a few good decades of selective breeding away from being full culinary fruits. These are not exact definitions, but, like most things in life, messy definitions are often the more useful ones.
Since "vegetable" only has a definition as a culinary term, I really don't get why people get so hung up on it. It's not like "nut" or "berry", whose culinary a botanical definitions couldn't be in more of a disagreement.
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(10 replies)
vegetable fruit discourse is fucking stupid. just call'em edibles if we're not getting into the scientifically proven specifics.
First of all, cucumbers get the same flack, and those are actually green.
Tomatoes will always be a vegetable to me. And I base that entirely on vibes.