Ours is a time in which people love to muddy distinctions, from crossover musicians to masters of fusion cuisine. But though we may not always be able to tell country from pop, boy from girl or East from West, most of us think we know a fruit from a vegetable, and we like it that way. No one wants to be the first with eggplant ice cream or asparagus Koolaid.
And yet the distinction is purely arbitrary. Ask a botanist to sort the produce section of your supermarket into one category or another and he would have a lot of work to do. In the fruit display, along with apples and oranges, he’d place tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, melons, gourds, okra, eggplants, ears of corn and pods of beans and peas. He’d point out that most nuts and grains are, properly speaking, fruits and you might have to stop him there before he rearranged the entire store.
A fruit is simply a mature, ripened ovary (and sometimes surrounding tissue) which contains a plant’s seeds. All of the angiosperms, which include most of the plants we know and grow, produce fruits. So what’s a vegetable? Unlike the word “fruit,” it is not a scientific term, but just a part of common speech. In its broadest sense it’s simply plant matter — as in “animal, vegetable or mineral.” The word “vegetative,” on the other hand, has a precise botanical meaning — a part or function of a plant not directly involved with reproduction by seeds. Thus, the stems, leaves and roots of a plant are vegetative parts and their growth is vegetative growth. Vegetative reproduction, also called asexual reproduction, occurs when a plant spreads by underground runners, for instance, or when you take cuttings of your favorite rose. You would think, then, that the “vegetables” we eat would include only non-reproductive parts such as celery stalks, carrots and spinach leaves. But the word is used for many fruits as well.
The dividing line, on the whole, is sweetness. Nature does tend to make fruits sweet and tasty so that animals will eat them and thereby scatter their seeds. This strategy removes new seedlings from competition with the mother plant and exposes them to a wider range of habitats as a hedge against extinction. Birds regurgitate them far away. Squirrels and rodents hide them, and any that remain uneaten may sprout. Mammals consume them and spread the seeds by defecation, packaged with a tidy little supply of nutritious scat. Vegetative plant parts, on the other hand, make no obvious effort to ingratiate themselves with the animal kingdom, and a lot of horticultural work has gone into developing the tender, tasty, nutritious ones we enjoy today. Fruits not quite sweet enough to be on a dessert menu are labeled vegetables — it’s as arbitrary as that. And nobody much cares, except the U.S. Supreme Court in 1893, which was forced to declare the tomato a vegetable for tariff purposes. Or the European Union, which purportedly ruled the carrot a fruit so that the Portuguese could sell their carrot jam.
Somehow the word vegetable has never had quite the favorable ring that we associate with “fruit.” Our labors are “fruitful”, our plans “bear fruit”, but a “vegetable” is something you become if you are hopelessly inactive. Fruits are sexy — naturally — because they are all about plant sex. And sweetness has immense power in our culture. Maybe too much. Children — and the inner child in many of us — tend to like fruits best, and famously avoid spinach and broccoli. But America’s taste is maturing. Farmers and gardeners now have better access to flavorsome vegetable varieties, not just the ones bred for ease of shipping. Some carrots, grown on good soil, after a few a nips of frost, are as sweet as strawberries. If corn is cooked right after picking (or chomped down raw!) even the old-fashioned “unenhanced” varieties are sugar sweet. And how about fresh peas, baby new potatoes, baked beets, and winter squash roasted until it its flesh caramelizes in the pan? We’re learning not to overcook summer squash, broccoli and green beans. We pair them with savory herbs and spices, or quality oils and cheeses, until they shine as the star of the meal. It’s been noted that in households which include a good cook, the family eats vegetables more often
Part of fruit’s appeal is its accessibility, served up ready-to-eat by the tree or bush itself, or placed in a bowl on the table for healthy snacking. Vegetables require a bit more effort, but it’s time well spent. All of those food pyramids that keep popping up stress vegetables’ importance; the government’s latest effort urges 2½ cups per day, as against 2 cups for fruits. I say the more of both the merrier, no matter what you call them.
Barbara Damrosch’s latest book is the “Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook.”
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