Fruits, vegetables or both ?
What happened ? #1
It should be easy right ? If it's sweet it's a fruit and if it's salty it's a vegetable.
Then why is there a debate on tomato for example ? Some people will say it’s a fruit and some will say it’s a vegetable. Considering the tomato is generally eaten within savory dishes (at least it is in France), it must be a vegetable, right? Well .... It's more complicated than that!
In fact, tomatoes are a fruit and a vegetable! It depends on the definition you are using.
In the culinary definitions, a fruit is a plant consumed as a dessert and vegetables are eaten in savory dishes.
Whereas, with the botanical definitions, fruits are a particular organ of the plant (it is the organ resulting from the fertilization of an ovary of the flower by pollen) that contain the seeds while vegetables include a vast number of different organs (roots, stems, leaves, etc).
So to summarize, the tomato is a vegetable because we eat it within savory dishes but it is also a fruit by its botanical definition.
But tomatoes are not the only botanical fruits eaten as a vegetables : eggplant, cucumber, squash, avocados or zucchinis for example have also this particularity.
In the end, we could say that knowing if a plant we eat is a fruit or a vegetable doesn’t seem really that important.
Indeed, it won't change our daily life. But it did bother the United States during a case in 1893.
At that time, customs duties were different depending on the type of products imported into the country. There were taxes on vegetables but not on fruits.
The Supreme Court had to deal with the tomato issue because a tomato importer, Nix, sued Hedden, the treasurer of the port of New York. Mr. Nix was furious because he had had to pay taxes on his tomatoes, even though he considered the tomato to be a fruit. In the end, Nix lost the lawsuit: the judge accepted the culinary definition of a vegetable and decided that tomatoes were vegetables, as they were eaten as a main course and not as a dessert.
On my side of the world, the European Commission decided on the contrary to define certain vegetables, including tomatoes, as fruits in 2001. All because of jam!
Indeed, the European Union has to standardize the definitions of the products available on the European market. Thus, a jam produced in Poland will be treated in the same way as a Spanish jam. This avoids unfair competition between European countries.
The EU therefore has decided to define jam as a mixture of fruit and sugar.
However, some traditional jams are made from certain vegetables, such as tomatoes or carrots. In order for these traditional recipes to fall within the definition of "jam", the Commission has then decided to consider tomatoes, rhubarb, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins as fruit when they are used to make jam.
So when it comes to our daily life, knowing if the plant that we eat is a vegetable or a fruit is just an interesting fact but it is something crucial for our governments to help them regulates trade !
Thank you for your attention ! Let me know what you thought !
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