Botanists say there’s no such thing as vegetables
According to botanists, there is no such thing as a vegetable.
Wolfgang Stuppy, a research leader in comparative plant and fungal biology at the U.K.’s world-renowned Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew & Wakehurst Place, told the BBC, “The term vegetable doesn’t exist in botanical terminology.”
If you ask a botanist, a fruit is defined as “an organ that contains seeds, protecting them as they develop and often aiding in their dispersal.” Biologically speaking, the fruit is a part of the plant that is vital for its survival. Its very purpose is to help the plant spread its seed, and its sweetness attracts animals who eat it the fruit (and seed) and excrete it out in another location.
That’s why tomatoes are technically fruit, even though we treat them like vegetables in our kitchens. And it’s why what we refer to as grains and nuts are botanically classified as fruits, too.
A vegetable is a little trickier to define. In the broadest sense, according to the dictionary, the term vegetable is used to define anything living that isn’t animal or mineral ― think the vegetable kingdom (which is another term for plant kingdom).
But if you ask a botanist, they’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a vegetable. “The term vegetable has no meaning in botany,” Amy Litt, director of plant genomics and Cullman curator at The New York Botanical Garden explained to LiveScience.
Why? Because from a biological standpoint, what we call vegetables are really just parts of plants. So botanists just call them by their parts.
Source: HuffPost