Do you really know what fruit is?

Do you remember when you popped your cherry tomato? You know, when you found out that tomatoes are fruits? (If this is news to you, congrats on recently becoming a member the fruit-mato club!) Well, tomatoes are just the beginning. Prepare to have your mind blown because you’ve been wrong about fruits all these years—unless you’re a botanist, in which case you’ve probably been correct.

See, fruits have seeds, usually a fleshy exterior and come from the blossom of a plant—fruit usually is the blossom—(pumpkin, avocado, corn kernels). Vegetables are just other edible parts of plants that don’t qualify as fruit—leaves, roots, stalks etc. (celery, spinach, carrots).

So what do you think each of the following are? Fruit or vegetable?
1 Beets  2 Zucchini  3 Potatoes  4 Eggplant  5 Bell peppers
(answers at bottom of post)

Why you should be glad you now know the difference: 

• It can help you in court (or the judge may ignore science)—In the Nix. v. Hedden case, the real trial was about fruit v. veggie. The definition of tomatoes determined whether they were taxed as vegetable imports, or not taxed as fruits. The Supreme Court mistakenly ruled veggie. 
• You can make a more interesting fruit salad—Hey, now that you’ve been introduced to all these new frutas, you’ve got some fresh combos to experiment with for your next fruit salad!  Or fruit lasagna with some yummy squash and zucchini.  
• You can flip a table at your local grocer—These food-providers have been feeding fruit(less) lies and mis-labeling to generations of naive cashiers. That deserves a good table-flipping! Or sample tray, you know, whatever’s available.
• You may not be eating the correct amount of vegetables—Maybe ignorance is bliss. With the correct definition of fruits, I think my daily veggie consumption went down to 1 on a good day.
  

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  How’d you do on the quiz?

1 Beets: vegetable 2 Zucchini: fruit 3 Potatoes: vegetable 4 Eggplant: fruit 5 Bell peppers: fruit