A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Botanically, there's no such thing as a vegetable.
That's a culinary term, which seems to cover some fruits, some plant roots, some plant stems, some plant leaves, and some plant flowers.While culinary fruits are the other botanical fruits, and a few flowers (figs are weird)
The legal decision is important for a slew of reasons including taxation, SNAP benefits, etc. The decision was less about science and more about the reality of how tomatoes are used in our society.
Consider that in German (and probably a ton of other languages too), there are just two different words for the botanical and the culinary definition of fruit, so you can have namespacing built in to the language
This is dumb, botanically tomatoes are a fruit doesn't preclude them being vegetables because vegetable isn't a botanical term at all. Tomatoes are fairly sweet but they have more culinarily in common with vegetables. Nutritionally I'm not positive but it's a separate issue.
Regardless the supreme court decision was regarding tariffs/imports/customs which makes sense to classify it simply by the way in which people consume it. People eat tomatoes as a vegetable, just like we eat zucchini and cucumber as vegetables despite them all also being fruit.
Obviously fruit/vegetable should be broken down into whether or not you can just make a sauce with it.
Tomatoes: easily broken0 down into a sauce Apples: guess what? saucable
Zucchini: not easily sauced. Cucumber: don't even think about it!
Hilarious but we're gonna end up with a few weird things like jackfruit and bananas becoming vegetables. I'd also add that apples are only sauceable through maceration which really puts them into the same camp as squash like zucchini, and any root really like carrots or celeriac.
Now I really want to try making a zucchini-cucumbersauce
Vegetables do not exist. Well, they exist as a culinary thing. Thereβs just no scientific/botanical definition of what makes something a vegetable.
From Mr. Lovenstein whose website unfortunately doesn't seem to work, except to redirect you to Meta-owned socials. Ugh.
I'm going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.
You weren't kidding!
California enforces many wildlife regulations. CESA, or the California Endangered Species Act, is designed to keep animal and plant life from extinction. The law covers any threatened βbird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant.β
Insects werenβt mentioned in the specific actβs wording. However, a separate California regulation legally defines fish as βa wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.β
So, are bees actually fish? Yes, because all invertebrates are according to California law. The broad definition of fish allows activists to fight for insect survival.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has clarified that βIt was not believed necessary to include the term invertebrate in the original legislation because βfishβ is defined in the Fish and Game Code to include βinvertebratesββ¦β
Talk about by-the-book!
Good.
There are two big grocery chains where I live. One puts the olives in the canned vegetable aisle, the other puts them in the canned fruit aisle. I keep forgetting which does which and end up in the wrong aisle every time.
Treat yourself next time you find them to a jar of kalamatas.
The fruit classification seems insane to me. Maybe Iβm unfamiliar with dishes that use it as a sweet?
Does that store have a separate aisle with canned beans, or is it just one big canned-things aisle?
Botanically, fruits don't have to be sweet. It's anything that's a seed carrier of some kind. Vegetables are other plant parts that don't contain seeds, more or less. It. Culinary usage takes a different approach, hence the different aisles.
Not sure about beans, I don't usually buy canned beans.
Yes, fruit is a botanical category, but vegetable is not.
Not unique because EU also classifies tomatoes as vegetables.
Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
The classification of fruit and vegetables can be based
on various approaches β botanical, agronomical,
culinary β thus resulting in different definitions. For
example, the tomato is botanically a fruit, but it is
commonly considered a vegetable from both the
agronomical and the culinary points of view.
The facts and figures presented in this briefing follow
Eurostat's definitions based on the farm management
and agronomical practices, according to which the
term 'fresh vegetable' refers to annual (or, rarely,
biennial) horticultural crops, and the term 'fruit' refers
to perennial crops.
Following this approach, tomatoes are included in the
main statistical aggregate of vegetables, as well as
melons, water melons and strawberries, which are
commonly considered and consumed as fruit.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/635563/EPRS_BRI(2019)635563_EN.pdf
All fruits are vegetables, but not a vegetables are fruit.
Vegetable = any edible plant part.
Fruit = Ovary of a flowering plant that carries the seeds.
I remember watching a YT video once about a legislative move of a US county to declare the number Pi to be exactly 3.
*State. It was Indiana.
* 3.2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFNjA9LOPsg β How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2 - Numberphile
And we laughed when some pope declared the capybara is a fish
When... what? π
Capybara are fish, so are bees, because fish don't actually exist.
The levels of validity may vary, but everything I said there is true in one form or another.
That only creates more questions π
So tomatoes are trans?
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
Distinction is inventing a fruit salad that a variety of tomato can fit into.
True wisdom