Tomato: Fruit or Vegetable
(A cultural botany take down)
It is an indisputable fact that tomatoes are a fruit. They contain seeds! Tomatoes are no less a fruit than plums or peaches or eggplant or zucchini. A more interesting question might be: what is a vegetable? Carrot is a root. Celery is a stem. Broccoli is a flower. Tomato is a fruit… so what is a vegetable?
The Oxford English Dictionary says that vegetables are: “any living organism that is not an animal.” By this definition, the oak tree and the hydrangea, like the tomato, are vegetables.
If you find the O.E.D’s definition unsettlingly broad, you might prefer to listen to Wolfgang Stuppy, the research leader in Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew & Wakehurst Place. According to Stuppy, “the term vegetable doesn’t exist in botanical terminology.” Simple as that.
Vegetables might not exist botanically, but they’re still taking up space culturally. Less archaic dictionary entries use words like “edible” and “savory.” These, I-know-it-when-I-taste-it definitions might be all we need. When you slice a tomato, do you sprinkle sugar or salt? If you bake a tomato pie, is it dinner, or desert?
Fruit is both a botanical and culinary term—vegetable isn’t. Botanically speaking, the tomato, (like the cucumber) is a fruit. And if you’re having a botanical discussion, that’s the word you should use. But if you’re in the kitchen, for the love of pizza call it a vegetable.
Aubrey Yarbrough is the Director of Community Development for Farmer Habit. Before moving to LA she ran her own organic farm and cooked on the garde manger station of the award winning Elements restaurant in Princeton, NJ. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing and the Los Angeles Press.