The whole fruit/vegetable controversy only comes because we’re trying to use two different domains of terms interchangeably: botanical terms and culinary terms.
Tomatoes (and squash, and pumpkins (which, side note, are a type of squash), and cucumbers) are botanically fruits, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as vegetables because they tend to be less sweet, particularly when raw. Mushrooms are botanically…well, I guess they’re botanically “n/a”, as they’re not a part of the plantae kingdom, but whatever–they’re typically considered botanical, so they’re “botanically” fungi, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as vegetables (or, interestingly, as meat replacements).
We get into the same linguistic confusion when we start throwing around “peanuts aren’t nuts, they’re legumes!”–botanically, yes, peanuts are legumes, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as nuts. See also: “green beans” are botanically pods, not beans, but we use them culinarily as vegetables; and many “berries” are botanically something else but we use them culinarily as berries; meaning they’re often left whole, mixed with other berries in the same dish, and go well with cream in cold summer desserts.
The whole thing is a misguided exercise in pedantry; “technically burritos aren’t sandwiches, they’re meat-sacks!” They’re both, and we instinctively understand that trying to compare the two terms is silly because “sandwich” is a culinary term and “sack” is not.
Another funny part of this is that pedants are trying to say that tomatoes are (botanically) fruits and not vegetables, but the closest thing to a definition we have for “vegetable” botanically is “literally all plant life and maybe also some fungi,” so tomatoes are clearly both fruit and vegetable botanically.Plus, they’re culinarily used as vegetables, but can also be used as fruits in some cakes, pies, sorbets, and so forth (and isn’t ketchup just a tomato smoothie?), so tomatoes are clearly both fruit and vegetable in culinary terms as well.edit: Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about (an ecologist) has corrected my botanical definition of “vegetable.” Actually, they’re “edible parts of a plant which are not fruit.” Which means that tomatoes are explicitly excluded as vegetables, being botanically a fruit. I don’t think that ruins my overall point in any way, though.
good post, sounds like a copypasta
Alas, it’s all me. I…tend to be a bit verbose.
Great post, with one caveat
the closest thing to a definition we have for “vegetable” botanically is “literally all plant life and maybe also some fungi,”
I got my degree in Ecology and Evolution, and we always used a similar working definition but it was “edible parts of a plant which are not fruit.” So basically botanically, stems, roots, leaves, flowers, and all subvarieties of those are vegetables. Fruits are fruits. Fungi are fungi.
It is a bit weird that we use some fruits as “vegetables”, like tomatoes and cucumbers. But, other fruits like mango or raspberry are so different from your typical “culinary vegetable” that you have to be very careful in how you use it in a savoury dish. There isn’t the same crossover for other edible plants. For example, I can’t think of any tuber that could sneak into a fruit salad unnoticed.
I guess it comes down to there being a lot more variety among fruits than other edible plant parts. Plus, humans have been tweaking edible plants for millennia. So, who knows, maybe the original cucumber was more “fruity”, but has been tuned over the years to be more “saladey”.
Jicama would be quite good in fruit salad.
You must be fun at parties.
I am actually…kind of just like this at parties. So, you be the judge.
I am 100% with your well written explanation here!
Just one ‘nitpick’, that isn’t really even a nitpick because you did qualify the relevant part with ‘tend to be’:
A properly grown tomato absolutely can be so flavorful, sweet, tangy, varied, complex… that you could just eat it like an apple.
Not as sweet as most apples, but way, way more sweet than the typical mass produced tomato you’re likely to get in the US.
I’ve been to a few farmers markets where… a couple of smaller farms were growing just absolutely stellar quality tomatoes.
…
On the other hand, squash and zucchini, even the fancy ones from farmers markets?
Main difference I noticed was basically perfect ripeness, they still just taste like nothing.
(I guess I should also point out this was from 10ish years back, sadly, a lot of farmers markets now have a lot of people basically just reselling some particular, slightly higher quality but still mass produced fruits and veggies, than aren’t even local)
…
Finally, to throw more insanity on this terminology dumpster fire…
Corn.
Corn is arguably, from different domains of technical or colloquial meaning… a fruit, vegetable, and grain.
After millennia of us artifically selecting (and then just outright genetically engineering) what was originally, basically a kind of grass, we now have something that is now so sweet, that the US uses it to make HFCS, a cane sugar substitute… and then we jam that HFCS … into bread, soda, everything.
So… ketchup… is then roughly a tomato/corn smoothie, made primarily from two… frui-getables.
Yep.
Fruigetable.
(froojzh-tah-bull)
((im too lazy to look up IPA symbols))
You’re welcome, bwahahah!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
A properly grown tomato absolutely can be so flavorful, sweet, tangy, varied, complex… that you could just eat it like an apple.
I am sad to say that, although I’ve heard of this, I have never had the pleasure of eating such a tomato.
Finally, to throw more insanity on this terminology dumpster fire…
Corn.
As a native son of Indiana, I have to say that’s the thing that breaks pretty much all of my categories. I lived the first twenty years of my life thinking that it qualified nutritionally (ugh, that’s another part of this terminology dumpster fire…the food pyramid. shudder) as a vegetable, which it…doesn’t really.
So… ketchup… is then roughly a tomato/corn smoothie, made primarily from two… frui-getables.
Great point. “Tomato smoothie” is already a term that makes me feel a little bit queasy, but adding in the corn…
Fruigetable.
Beautiful. fɹud͡ʒ.tə.bəl, I think, incidentally.
Beautiful. fɹud͡ʒ.tə.bəl, I think, incidentally.
That seems right to me, the… what is that a lower case sigma?
iirc, thats the sort of… rolling ‘zh’ sound I was going for…
… though I think maybe we just have a natural dialect difference for how how to pronounce vegetable, as you’ve got the same vowel sound for the last two syllables?
But anyway, yeah, I think I came up with ‘fruigtable’ almost 20 years ago, upon first learning how much overlap there is due to all this linguistic silliness… so i choose chaos, and decided to add to it, and now I finally have a relevant time to use the nonsense/compound word, woo!
I only have the most pedestrian understanding of the IPA from a single class in college (which was a long time ago), so I’ll admit I just grabbed the IPA off of Wiktionary for “fruit,” “vegetable,” and “fudge” to bridge between the two. It looks good enough to my eyes to be at least reasonable.
Actually, “mushrooms are technically meat” is a new hill I’d like to die on. Mushrooms have animal cells, ergo, definitely not a vegetable.
They don’t, they’re a distinct third thing with a distinct third type of cells
They are, however, more closely related to us animals than they are to plants. As in, our last common ancestor is less far back.
Also, unrelated to your comment, but related to the post: vegetable isn’t a botanical term, but a culinary term. So, there’s no bioligical basis for vegetable in the first place, so there’s no issue with counting mushrooms among them. Sure, it’s a bit inconvenient that the word ‘fruit’ is both a culinary and a botanical term in English, and there’s overlap to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s somehow illogical that some things are culinarilu fruits but not botanically, and vice versa.
So, there’s no bioligical basis for vegetable in the first place
idk if I would go that far, I think “edible parts of plants” is a solid foundation. Sure, “edible” is kind of a social construct, but the plant part is indisputable. “Vegetarian” and “plant based diet” are near synonymous
Maybe non-animal is better than just plant, since mushrooms are part of plant based diets.
I’ve never been under the impression that any edible plant part is a vegetable. Like, an almond? An apple? Rice? Cinnamon? I could go on. All edible plant parts. I’ve never heard of them be referred to as vegetables.
“Are red pandas carnivores or herbivores?” “They eat like 80% bamboo, so herbivores.” “Wrong! They are taxonomically in the order carnivora, making them carnivores! Please ignore that carnivore also just means meat eater and herbivore isn’t even a taxonomic clade. People only ever talk to me to get mad at this switching between casual and scientific definitions, I am nothing without it.”
They’re (mushrooms) also constantly listed on American menus as a “protein” option despite a dire lack of the stuff
Hmm, is it really that little? The stats look devastating, like e.g. 3 grams per 100 grams, but mushrooms also consist out of 90+ grams of water.
For example, the button mushroom has:
100 g total - 91.8 g water - 1.7 g fiber = 6.5g nutrients
2.89 g protein / 6.5 g nutrients = 44.4% proteinComparing that to e.g. canned black beans:
100 g total - 70.8 g water - 6.69 g fiber = 22.51 g nutrients
6.91 g protein / 22.51 g nutrients = 30.9% proteinYes but you don’t dehydrate the food. And you’re not eating multiple kgs of mushrooms in a single sitting, which you would need to get anywhere close to the total amount of protein in other ‘protein’ options
Yes but you don’t dehydrate the food
You kinda do unless you eat then raw. Cooking removes water content.
Cooked beef has 26-35 grams of protein per 100g. Uncooked like 20, and beef doesn’t contain as much water as mushrooms do.
I’d say it’s acceptable to have them in the high protein part, as macro-wise, they are.
That’s a neat site, and I was hoping your answer was in there, but they don’t have data on cooked mushrooms. We’ll have to do a bit of math.
So you’re taking the nutritional data provided and then shunting the fiber and water out of the way. Why? You can’t just eat the nutritional parts of food; you have to eat the whole thing, and that limits the amount of food, and thus nutrition, you can ingest in a day.
Were you thinking about food prep? Some water weight is lost there, certainly, but it’s not everything.
Let’s add a raw steak into the mix, and then we can instead look at how much water weight is actually lost when you prep these things to eat, by estimating it from data elsewhere.
The beans are ready to eat. They’re drained and rinsed. You don’t remove that water weight. So that’s 7 grams of protein per 100 gram serving.
The steak will lose about 25% of its weight when cooked, per multiple sources I found during a search. That means we need about 133 grams of raw beef to achieve 100 grams of cooked beef. So we can multiply its 21 grams of protein by 1.33, and we get about 29 grams of protein in a 100 gram serving. Their grilled steak averages around the same amount, so we’re on track so far.
Why is that discrepancy so great? I thought beans were supposed to be a great replacement for meat?
That comparison was done between beef and dry beans (note the 24 grams of protein, about the same as the beef). 100 grams of dry beans becomes about 370 grams of prepared beans. So in a 100 gram serving of beans you can actually eat, you get just over a quarter of that 24 grams protein: our ~7 grams from earlier. You also lose some water soluble protein when you rinse and drain them. They’re not the magic protein replacement people think they are.
Mushrooms are even worse. Per America’s Test Kitchen (and we’re gonna have to take these numbers at face value because I can’t find anything else), shiitake mushrooms lose about 14% of their weight in water when cooked, and cremini (think portobello, they’re just different stages of development) mushrooms lose about 60%. Thankfully the USDA’s site also has nutritional data listed for these two types of mushrooms: “minimally processed” shiitake and cremini mushrooms contain 2.4 and 3.1 grams of protein, respectively, per 100 gram serving. But those aren’t meal ready. To do that, we’ll cook the mushrooms, and they’ll shrink to 86 gram and 40 gram servings. So let’s start with enough raw mushrooms—119 grams of shiitake (or 119% of the original serving) and 250 grams (250%) of cremini. Multiply our proteins by 1.19 and 2.5 and we get a plausible range of between 3 and 8 grams of protein per 100g serving. So some are comparable to beans in their protein content! And some contain half, or less, of an already low amount when compared to the protein found in meat.
This quick comparison on Wolfram Alpha shows a similar story, with a less optimistic look at mushrooms’ possible protein content. Screenshot:
Now, the fact that you’re taking in so much more water when you eat 100 grams of beans or mushrooms than you are when you eat meat means you can eat more of them, and drink less fluids, but only to a point. And you’re certainly not getting 8 times more mushrooms than beef from a restaurant when they do a protein substitution. Getting enough protein in a vegetarian or vegan diet can be hard work. And restaurants are not making it easier by misleading people who may not know any better—I’m certain it’s careless, not malicious, but it is happening either way.
All the protein figures you have been using for the calculations have been crude protein, i.e. a estimate based on nitrogen content.
It’s much better to use DIAAS as a measure of usable protein.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino_Acid_Score
Also a neat site. It seems like the ratio of usable protein would be a good addition to, but a lacking substitute for, the raw quantities. Especially given how incomplete the PCDAAS and DIAAS datasets are.
they don’t have data on cooked mushrooms.
Probably because there are many ways to cook a mushroom. For example dehydration would apparently increase the protein per unit.
Always dismiss those people who talk about how tomatoes are fruits as nerds. The category “vegetable” in the kitchen usually refers to more savory plants, not that what part of the fruit it is. Also if you’re still one of those “um, ackchually, tomatoes are fruits” kind of people, then eat tomatoes like apples. Maybe even some chili peppers too, they’re berries.
It’s just interesting that there’s a distinction between botanical and culinary classification. Once you realise that there are two different systems that don’t necessarily need to completely agree then it’s not a big deal.
…also, what exactly is wrong with taking a bite out of a tomato like an apple? They’re delicious.
My driving instructor ate tomatoes like apples, got a whole wooden crate of them in the morning and a shaker of salt, I probably could’ve mowed down a few pedestrians as long as that man had his tomatoes.
A burger meal is mostly vegetable and fruits, vegetable bread a thin slice of meat. served with vegetable potatoes (fries), vegetable hot sauce, tomatoes, and a vegetable drink filled with the vegetable corn syrup.
vegetables are good for you, they say.
This is the kind of guy who eats tomatoes as fruits
Do you want to be like that guy?
Strawberries, blackberries, mulberries, and raspberries are not berries.
Bananas, aubergine (eggplants), oranges and grapes are berries.
Dangleberries aren’t real berries either.
Leave mycelium alone
Why is it yourcelium
It’s everybody’s celium. Mycelium. Yourcelium. Ourcelium.
It’s ourcelium komrad
Yeah but a mushroom’s such a fungi to be with.
“Fruiting bodies,” even
The true misconception is that there are scientific definitions and culinary definitions. No the culinary definitions don’t fit their scientific category. They’re not intended to.
Vegetables are a social construct. Depending on culture this is differently labled. Afaik there are No vegetables in a botanical sense. Just “fruits”.
Fungi only got its own kingdom in 1969, before that they were a phylum in Plantae. There are tons of people still around who learned “mushrooms are plants” in school, so it’s not surprising downstream vocabulary hasn’t caught up.
I don’t think I’ve ever considered a mushroom a vegetable, they’re just mushrooms
I believe, that’s mostly a US thing, where the government classifies them as vegetables…
Fruits vs vegetables is an arbitrary, near-meaningless distinction. See here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E8mcTIEVKUU
No a fruit is a biologically defined thing right? On the vegetables I’m with you
The video addresses this. The biological term “fruit” is not accurate for culinary use. Lots of things we eat are biologically fruit, but you’d get weird looks for calling it a “fruit” while eating it. The video gives a lot of examples of botanical-fruit-but-not-culinary-fruit, including cucumbers, peppers, corn, eggplant, peas, pumpkins, and broccoli (specifically the buds).
