Switch Witch Wondering #3: Fruit or Veggie?

Jill’s last blog inspired me to look in to one of the age old, food related, questions of life: Is it a fruit or is it a veggie?! Yes, I am talking about the tomato! Oh and also, the cucumber!! And peppers and eggplant! Are there others that you wonder about? I did some research and found the following enlightening information from the livescience website:

“A peach is a fruit, whoever you are, and a carrot is definitely a vegetable. But in the Venn diagram relating these two produce categories, there’s a sizeable region of overlap. It results from the fact that “fruit” and “vegetable” are defined differently depending on whether you’re a gardener or a chef.

Dead center of the overlapping region sits the tomato. So, why is it a fruit, and why is it a vegetable?

Botanically speaking, a fruit is a seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary of a flowering plant, whereas vegetables are all other plant parts, such as roots, leaves and stems. By those standards, seedy outgrowths such as apples, squash and, yes, tomatoes are all fruits, while roots such as beets, potatoes and turnips, leaves such as spinach, kale and lettuce, and stems such as celery and broccoli are all vegetables.