What is the Difference Between a Fruit and a Vegetable?

Is a zucchini a fruit or a vegetable? How about a tomato? Pumpkin?

I’ve been wondering this for my entire life, and I’ve finally found the answer: it depends.

Botanically, a fruit is a “seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary of a flowering plant”, which can include anything with seeds or a pit. This includes fruits like a watermelon, which has seeds inside, or strawberries, which have seeds inside, or a peach, which has one big pit inside.

Vegetables, according to the botanical definition, are any other edible part of a plant. This includes the roots of plants, like onions or potatoes, leaves, like spinach or kale, or anything else on the plant.

Easy, right?

Here’s where it can get confusing: sometimes we use other definitions than the botanical ones! In the kitchen, it can be more helpful to classify fruits and vegetables based on how they taste or how they work in certain dishes. You wouldn’t substitute tomato pie for apple pie, just like you wouldn’t sauté strawberries instead of zucchini. According to LiveScience, “In the 1893 United States Supreme Court case Nix. v. Hedden, the court rule unanimously that an imported tomato should be taxed as a vegetable, rather than as a (less taxed) fruit. The court acknowledged that a tomato is a botanical fruit, but went with what they called the "ordinary" definitions of fruit and vegetable — the ones used in the kitchen.” When it has to do with cooking, laws, or money, sometimes we use other definitions of fruits and vegetables.

There’s one more thing that can cause confusion: not all fruits these days have seeds! What about seedless watermelons? Or mandarin oranges? Or bananas? Well, seeds aren’t fun to eat (although they can be fun to spit out), so scientists and farmers have figured out how to make fruits without seeds. We know seeds are important for plants to grow, so we’ve figured out how to grow them in a different way. We can actually cut off a piece of a plant and plant it somewhere else, and grow a whole new plant that is a clone of the original, without needing to plant seeds. In this way, we can breed plants that have no seeds (or very, very tiny and nonfunctional seeds like in bananas), but still be able to make more, even without having any seeds! They’re still technically fruits, though.

Here’s another cool distinction: a berry is a fruit that has seeds inside the sweet fleshy part, which means that strawberries aren’t technically berries (seeds are on the outside) and bananas are!

Sources:

https://www.livescience.com/33991-difference-fruits-vegetables.html

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/fruit-vs-vegetable