Vegetables are a social construct. Depending on culture this is differently labled. Afaik there are No vegetables in a botanical sense. Just "fruits".
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.
What do you mean?
Leave mycelium alone
Why is it yourcelium
It's everybody's celium. Mycelium. Yourcelium. Ourcelium.
It's ourcelium komrad
Better check your privilegelium
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vegetables aren't even a thing botanically, they're basically "plant stuff that isn't fruit", except when it is.
Botanically speaking, vegetables can be roots (carrots, beets), stems (celery, asparagus), leaves (spinach, lettuce), flowers (broccoli, cauliflower) seeds (peas, beans), and of course fruits that we treat as savory (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants).
And then on the opposite side you have things we call fruits that botanically speaking aren't. Rhubarb is a stem, strawberries are aggregate accessory fruits where the fleshy part we eat is actually swollen stem tissue, and those little "seeds" on the outside are the real fruits of the plant. Figs are not simple fruits, they're inverted flower clusters where the "fruit" is actually a hollow stem containing many tiny real fruits inside.
Even apples and pears aren't true fruits botanically, they're accessory fruits where much of what we eat comes from the flower's receptacle rather than just the ovary.
So yeah the botanical vs. culinary divide works both ways. Our everyday food categories are really more about taste, texture, and how we use foods rather than plant biology.
Who the hell calls rhubarb a fruit?
unironically tho eating tomatoes straight up is pretty fire
This is the kind of guy who eats tomatoes as fruits
Do you want to be like that guy?
I agree, salads are morally reprehensible
Tomatoes and fruits are a great litmus test (no pun intended) to see if a person can recognize the domain of their knowledge. Some people glomp onto a fact that is correct in some scenarios and use it as an "umm actually" where it isn't appropriate or even correct (like the definition of racism)
Big Mushroom is going to take out OP, Boeing-style.
They're going to fly a holding pattern over his house until one of the doors inevitably falls off?
Sure, but they are fun guys!
Tomatoes are fun guys indeed.
"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."
Yeah but a mushroom's such a fungi to be with.
Let's not forget that apples, strawberries and cashews are pseudofruits, just like the produce of my labor!
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.
knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. wisdom is taking that tomato, pureeing it into a sauce, and slathering it on a well done steak
WTF.. Well done steak smothered in tomato puree…
/boggle
and slathering it on a well done steak
Burn the heretic!
TBF, if your steak is well done, you're probably gonna need some sauce since half the flavor has been cooked out of it.
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.
They have properties from plants but also from animals, it's an independent evolution from both.
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