It's a Fruit!

I was on Twitter yesterday and someone asked the question whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Someone else posted that they thought it was a fruit but there is always a picture of one on a can of V-8 so, maybe it wasn’t. That got me responding with more vehemence than it probably deserved but hey, I worked hard for my Biology degree. Sometimes it is fun to let it out of its case.

First and foremost, yes, it is a fruit. But what is a fruit? A fruit is the ripened, seed-bearing ovary of a flowering plant. Okay, then what is a vegetable? From a human dietary standpoint, a vegetable is any part of a plant that you eat that is not a fruit. So, it could be a root (like carrots, or radishes), or the leaves (like lettuce, or cabbage), or the stem (like celery). A potato is a tuber which is actually a fleshy part of the stem that grows underground, so it is a vegetable.

A fruit does not have to be sweet, and it does not have to be edible (to humans). The purpose of a fruit is as a seed dispersal device. An animal comes along and eats a fruit. He then walks for a few miles (or in the case of birds, it could be hundreds of miles) before the digestive system runs its course and the seeds (which have been designed to survive an animal’s digestive system) are excreted along with some fertilizer to boot. Pretty soon a new baby plant starts growing in a new location. If something bad happens in the old location like a landslide, or a fire, or an ice age, having plants spring up in different places adds to the likelihood of the survivability of the species.

Fruits are classified into a variety of specialized groups. The names of some of these are familiar, Like berries, legumes, or pomes. Other fruit types are not in the everyday vocabulary. Let’s look at a few (and you may be surprised):

Berries: This is probably the most well-known name, but not everything that we call a berry is actually a berry. A berry is a simple fruit whose pericarp (ovary walls) become fleshy. Now, prepare for your mind to be blown a little bit. A strawberry is not a berry. Raspberries and blackberries are not berries (more on them later). So, what are berries? Blueberries are, as you might expect,  but so are bananas and tomatoes. That’s right. Tomatoes and bananas are berries.

Drupes: These are fruits where the inner wall of the ovary has hardened into a pit. Examples include peaches, plums, coconuts, and cherries.

Pomes: Fruits where fleshy tissue surrounds the pericarp. These include apples, and pears.

Pepos: Fruit with a leathery rind and a fleshy fruit. Examples include cucumbers, squashes, melons.

Hesperidia: A many chambered fruit. These include oranges and lemons.

There are also dry fruits like legumes (members of the pea family), capsules include various nuts and samaras (you know, those helicopter things that come off maple trees), and other fruits with various devices that are not intended to be eaten, but are designed to be carried by the wind to diverse places.

Accessory fruits: Fruits where some part of the plant other than the ovary makes up the fruit. An example is the strawberry where what we tend to think of as the seeds are actually the fruits, and what we think of as the fruit is a modified receptacle (the base of the flower).

Aggregate fruits: Fruits that derive from a flower with multiple pistils. So, it looks like many little fruits that have combined into one. Examples are blackberries and raspberries These are actually many little drupelets clumped together.

Multiple fruit: These are where the ovaries of many flowers cluster together to form one large “fruit”. An example of this would be a pineapple.

There are many more types of fruits. I won’t go into all of them because they get less familiar. We tend to think of fruit as being sweet and juicy, but as you can see, fruits include a lot of things that are neither. In some cases (like nuts) we eat the seeds and throw away the fruit. So, nature finds a way (a myriad of ways) to scatter seeds all over the globe. And, just to reiterate: yes Virginia, a tomato is a fruit.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner