Spyke
lemmy.world

Vegetables aren’t real. They made up the classification just to sell things that aren’t fruits.

159

I get accidentally double posting, how did you triple post?

1
Klearreply
quokk.au

You need to be in a better region.

56
sopuli.xyz

Yeah I knew mushrooms were shady shit since when they snuck in with the badgers. Nobody batted an eye back then and look at where we are now.

95

Why you hatin' on mushrooms? They're a fungi, if you get to know 'em

5
lemmy.world

Fruit has a botanical and a culinary definition.

Vegetable only has a culinary definition.

Trying to decide on what food fits which category purely on the botanical definition of fruit is silly. In many other languages, the botanical and culinary definition even use completely different words. It's like saying lobster is red meat using a scientific definition of red.

But if we are having fun with this, rhubarb: definitely no fruit, but far too sweet, too often consumed raw or minimally processed, and far too at home in a yoghurt to fit nicely into the group vegetable.

54
Revan343reply
lemmy.ca

But if we are having fun with this, rhubarb: definitely no fruit, far too sweet to fit nicely into vegetable.

Oh boy, another reason to hate rhubarb.

Also, you want a sweet vegetable? Sugar beet.

7
blackbrookreply
mander.xyz

Well vegetable used to be used sometimes to mean "plant".

Most people don't really understand how words work.

2

Vegetation. It's right there in the root lol you're 100% correct with people not getting how words work

2

It's fair enough to call things different to what that actually are. Vegetables in common language just means the stuff treated as vegetables in the kitchen. Calling all the things that are actually fruit fruit isn't really useful in the kitchen. I don't want tomato or pumpkin or cucumber in a fruit salad

Likewise with berries. Using the scientific names isn't useful in the kitchen, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries are all used similarly, despite only one of those is technically a berry

1

Having both definition of the same word that can be confused with each other is also silly, the culinary definition should find a new word.

0
lemmy.zip

I'm sorry, who exactly is out here calling mushrooms vegetables??

27
azertyfunreply
sh.itjust.works

If it goes in soup, it's a vegetable. If it goes in Sangria, it's a fruit.

Next question please.

33

Assuming you like eating chicken, when is it wrong to pair chicken with vegetables? I made a vegetable-mushroom-chicken soup last week and it was delish. Whether chicken is or isn't a vegetable is an academic concern, not a culinary one.

Try putting mushrooms or chicken in the sangria however and you'll be rightfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

4
lemmy.world

Hmmm. Since breakfast cereal is demonstrably soup, that makes strawberries, Cheerios, and Reese's Puffs all vegetables. Good to know.

6
azertyfunreply
sh.itjust.works

Oh, fun! The debate over the culinary vs botanical meaning of fruit intersecting with the debate of culinary vs topological meaning of soup.

Breakfast cereal is soup[topological] but not soup[culinary]. It is therefore not a contradiction for it to be fruit[culinary].

8

Would it be soup or broth? Soup typically has something besides liquid to it afaik

2
azertyfunreply
sh.itjust.works

Water is debatable, everything else why not. If a recipe is generic enough to call for "vegetables", you wouldn't be wrong to include any of those things.

3

If it is from a plant and it goes into fruit salad, it's fruit

2

I absolutely call them vegetables. It's a kitchen term and it absolutely makes sense to categorise them alongside tomatoes, beans, carrots, squash and cabbage. People get too hung up on things only belonging to exactly one category.

19
BussyCatreply
lemmy.world

Take a piece of paper with 3 squares drawn on it

And hand a person a picture of an apple, tomato, pepper, cucumber, pork cutlet, and mushroom and ask them to put the pictures into the squares and then label each square

Average person will definitely label a box as vegetables and put the mushrooms in it

6
Lumidaubreply
feddit.org

Well if you tell me to use only three categories and one of them will obviously be "meat", then I won't put them with apples.

9
TexasDrunkreply
lemmy.world

One box labeled "Brown when cooked properly". Then mushrooms can go in the box with the apples and cutlets.

11

That sign can't stop me because I can't cook (let alone properly).

8

Apple, tomato, peppers, and cucumbers are all fruits

Mushrooms are mushrooms

Pork is meat

But if you give the average person those it’s much more likely they will make the categories fruits, vegetables, and meat and put mushrooms in the vegetable category

1
Vespairreply
lemmy.zip

Why are we starting this scenario with the arbitrary restriction of 3? Yes, if you give people any number of items and tell them there is a finite number of categories, they were will find a way to divide those items into three. That doesn't mean they wouldn't come up with a more compelling argument for their choices when told to divide into 4 groups.

At no point have our options ever only been "fruit or vegetable," but yeah I guess if you tell people those are their only choices of course they'll adhere. But like... I've never known anyone who though those were the only choices?

1
BussyCatreply
lemmy.world

The point is that may people will instinctually call mushrooms a vegetable

If we take that same example and add 4 categories and then add milk as another item I am still willing to bet the average person will put mushrooms as a vegetable and make the categories fruit vegetable dairy meat even though vegetables aren’t real and you could have a category of animal products.

Now if you only quiz the biology majors you might get a different result but in the U.S. only 38% of people are college educated and the most common major is business

1

I have no college credits and I would never call a mushroom a vegetable

1
Epherareply
lemmy.ml

I believe, it's a US thing. This is a quote from the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA):

Other Vegetables: All other fresh, frozen, and canned vegetables, cooked or raw: for example, asparagus, avocado, bamboo shoots, beets, bitter melon, Brussels sprouts, cabbage (green, red, napa, savoy), cactus pads (nopales), cauliflower, celery, chayote (mirliton), cucumber, eggplant, green beans, kohlrabi, luffa, mushrooms, okra, onions, radish, rutabaga, seaweed, snow peas, summer squash, tomatillos, and turnips.

Source: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans-2020-2025.pdf (page 28)

I've read elsewhere that the reason for the DGA to conflate them, is because mushrooms have comparable nutrients to vegetables. So, from a dietary and regulatory viewpoint, it makes some amount of sense. But yeah, I feel like you could have just had a category "vegetables & mushrooms".

4
lemmy.zip

I know this is probably a repost but the self-censorship is super annoying and has entered the lexicon in ways that can permanently damage human communication as a whole.

Yeah sure censor stuff from kid shows but we're at the point where "unalive" and "pdf file" are being used as code words. Everyone knows what they mean, even the censors.

27
Scrollonereply
feddit.it

100% agree, we live in a 1984 age.

Also, using stupid words such as unalive doesn't make any sense because the algorithm of social media companies knows exactly what it means.

11

Its coming from Tiktok. Bytedance has heavy word censorship and if one of your comments or videos was flagged as inappropriate and had one of those words your account would be automatically suspended for review.

So a lot of normal westerm words got flagged. Kill. Dead. Any word related to sex. Hole. (Lol) basically every curse word.

Then there are gray words like Pedophile where people think it changes the algorithm to show your videos less if they contain them, but no one has any proof from what I can tell.

8

I use things like "he has chosen to meet his ancestors right then and there"

3

It's also extremely weird because people often just default to the "hidden meaning" completely ignoring context. There were so many instances where I was being shouted at for writing "CP" on the Cyberpunk subreddit, it was just weird...

5

It's annoying that its driven by ad revenues, and made more dumb by the fact that if everyone can decode it, then they're still advertising over sex and violence. So the whole endeavor is pointless.

But I don't think it will cause any harm. Humans have been using slang, code, and memetic language to obscure meaning from others and identify their in-crowds since the dawn of human language. Some of it is dumber than others, but it won't cause any harm.

2

There is absolutely no chance that this idiotic self censorship can permanently damage human communication.

1
lemmy.today

My wife and I like to joke that vegetables aren't real and all of them are just something else in reality.

26
lemmy.world

You're correct! "Vegetable" is a culinary term. "Fruit" is both botanical and culinary. The "tomato isn't a fruit" nonsense comes from people trying to conflate the two; if we called botanical fruits "grunkles" we wouldn't have this problem.

40

All in favor of renaming botanical fruits to "gruntled"?

Aye

Edit: God damn you, autocorrect

7
programming.dev

I have a simple flowchart to determine what is or isn't a veggie:

> Can I eat it? -> Yes -> Does it come from an animal? -> No = Vegetable

23

... Is it not?

Being a grain (or even specifically a "Cereal grain") doesn't exclude it, see corn.

2

Sand has a lot of minerals in it. Probably the healthiest veggie of them all!

9
davidgroreply
lemmy.world

I mostly agree, but there's a few holes in that flowchart:

My favorite vegetables are salt and ice.

5

I also add: Does it taste good?

I do this because of cranberries. I do not eat anything that you can make candles or soap from......

1
burntbaconreply
discuss.tchncs.de

Fruit salads are an abomination anyway. It's like someone was going to make smoothies and their blender broke. A tomato in a fruit salad doesn't seem any crazier than some of the other things in those anyway.

1
slrpnk.net

I'd argue they're less of an abomination than the "salad" that requires jello and cottage cheese

7
burntbaconreply
discuss.tchncs.de

Tell you what, you bring your worst salad, and I'll bring mine. I think I have some chicken salad that's been in the fridge for a few months that the partner forgot about.

5

I think the only winning move was not to play. Excuse me while I go throw out a salad and try to keep my lunch down.

5
Epherareply
lemmy.ml

Excuse me, it's smoothies that are an abomination, if anything.

You've got beautiful fruit where each bite tastes and feels different, which have long fibers with structural integrity to prevent your stomach from ingesting the sugar all at once, and then you decide:
Nah, I'd rather have fruit soup, where the whole thing just has a singular monotonous taste. And where there's nothing to chew. Just sign me up for the retirement home now.

1
burntbaconreply
discuss.tchncs.de

Whoah, calm down, killer. I am in the same camp as you with smoothies. I just think fruit salads are worse. Smoothies (not made at home) at least usually take into account how flavors should blend together.

1
Epherareply
lemmy.ml

I was overplaying it for comedic effect. 🙃

My mum makes fruit salad with oranges, apples, bananas and then adds in apple juice to make it blend well.

3
aussie.zone

In terms of botany, a vegetable isn't a thing (it's a culinary term).

Whereas a fruit has a specific botanical term (and a culinary term).

Not everything is "one or the other", some things are neither (Rhubarb), and some are both (tomato).

11
psudreply
aussie.zone

You can't say "both" when there are three choices

  1. Vegetable as a culinary term
  2. Fruit as a culinary term
  3. Fruit as a botanical term
1

It's the difference between the culinary use of the word and the biological use of the word. I thought we already figured that out?

10

Still a fun observation in relation to mushrooms.

3
lemmy.world

The thing is too that mushrooms don't even cook like vegetables or even like a protein or anything. So not only are they not botanically vegetables, they aren't even culinarily vegetables either.

Also if you don't like mushrooms because of the texture, you're probably cooking your mushrooms wrong.

9
coaxilreply
lemmy.zip

I just think mushrooms taste like shit, meh at best, not a texture thing.

1
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Is that just the normal ones you find at the grocery store, or have you tried other types? I think oyster mushrooms are really good when you fry them until they are crispy. Lion's mane is really good too, I like to make vegan pulled pork with them. The flavor of some foraged ones are also amazing like chantarell and black trumpets. Chicken of the woods also tastes and kinda feels like lemony dry chicken. There's soooo many great mushrooms

4

Have tried all the ones you mentioned and many more over my years, I grew up amongst old world hippies, have eaten many a mushroom, wish I had the taste for them, just don't really. Some are def better than others, but overall I find them very meh

4

I mean there's only hundreds of them, you have tried them all right?

It's like saying I don't like all meat because you dislike snake jerky.

2

Also if you don’t like mushrooms because of the texture,

I think mushrooms get a bad rap. People talk about the dirt they're in being grown in feces, like it's any different than every other crop that's grown. Potatoes are grown up close and personal in soil too and soil isn't clean :)

We might find there's a flavor component like cilantro that some can taste. Or maybe they just don't like the idea of the grown in soil and hard to clean, or maybe they don't like that we're eating the repuductive organs.

my brother-in-law hates them, but loves my mashed potato dish that loaded down. I just reduce mushrooms, garlic, and onions in butter until they're about to start to get firm then blitz them to slightly chunky gravy, stir that back into refrigerated looosely smashed potatoes, with some soft butter and a little chicken bone broth. When i'm done the flavor is still there, but it's a background note to the potato/butter/chicken

1
lemmy.ca

Mushrooms are detachable fungal penises that jizz into the wind.

8
buttnuggetreply
lemmy.world

That’s cool. I like that I’m sucking off cooked rudimentary peni.

2

Tomatoes are biologically fruit, but culinarily they are a vegetable.

You wouldn't expect them to put an orange slice on your burger because you asked for some veg, would you? But you'd expect tomatoes, tomatoes are veg outside of any scientific context. Language is fickle. Life is complicated. Reality defies categorization.

8
lemmy.world

I had always learned if it has seeds (in nature) then it was a fruit, otherwise it was a vegetable or something else

8

The definition strictly is "fruiting body", that their flower head goes through a process of becoming a fruiting body

2
geissireply
feddit.org

if it has seeds (in nature) then it was a fruit, otherwise it was a vegetable

Many vegetables have seeds.
Pumpkins are already in the example, but think peppers, legumes

2
feddit.org

The thing is fruit/vegetable is not a category in botany. Fruit exists, and it kinda has that definition, that it carries seeds, but that doesn't serve to distinguish it from vegetables.

Fruit/vegetable is a culinary distinction, rather than a scientific one.

2
lemmy.world

And this is the whole point of the controversy: The same word can have multiple meanings in different contexts and some people have trouble with that concept.

2
psudreply
aussie.zone

There's no controversy, only differing categories.

If you are saying tomato is a fruit, you are using the botany category

When I say tomato is a vegetable, I am using the culinary category

If there's argument it's only because someone is keeping the category secret

1
fedia.io

When people say that they are wrong. There are two different definitions for the word "fruit". They're homonyms for completely different words. It's like if i ask you: Which is lighter, a black Mini Cooper, or a white Hummer? Depends on which definition of "lighter" you're asking about

8

vegetable fruit discourse is fucking stupid. just call'em edibles if we're not getting into the scientifically proven specifics.

4
infosec.pub

What? Who’s calling pumpkins, squashes, and cucumbers vegetables?

And no one calls mushrooms vegetables: mushrooms are mushrooms.

4
infosec.pub

People putting things into salads need to chill out.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, salt, pepper, bacon, eggs, dressing, croutons, cheese, olives, olive oil, vinegar, peppers, salsa, chicken, steak, tortilla chips, limes, chow mien noodles, etc. are all things one might put in a salad that aren’t vegetables. You don’t have to label everything vegetables just because there’s some lettuce in there.

5
qjkxbmwvzreply
startrek.website

What exactly is a vegetable, by your definition?

As others point out, vegetable is a culinary term; fruit is a botanical and culinary term.

3
infosec.pub

Any edible non-fruit part of a plant. I’ll also make exceptions for nonstandard fruits like pods and kernels.

1

Because we all collectively decided fruit were their own thing? They’re the juicy snack plants give away to trick animals into spreading their seeds.

I’m not sure why the ancient chefs decided to be silly. They should have just called it all “plants” and be done with it.

1

As the other comment implied, salads are a poor gauge as to whether something is treated as a vegetable.

Better to use a crudité. And button mushrooms (which are the same species as portabello!) belong in a crudité.

1

"Vegetable" is a culinary term. It does not mean "plant", it is not the opposite of the botanical "fruit". It means "We use this in culinary traditions similarly to other vegetables".

Pumpkin, Squash and Mushrooms all fit into soup and not into fruit salads, so they're all vegetables. Cucumbers are veggies for fitting into actual salads, though they're only like a few good decades of selective breeding away from being full culinary fruits. These are not exact definitions, but, like most things in life, messy definitions are often the more useful ones.

Since "vegetable" only has a definition as a culinary term, I really don't get why people get so hung up on it. It's not like "nut" or "berry", whose culinary a botanical definitions couldn't be in more of a disagreement.

4

Tomatoes will always be a vegetable to me. And I base that entirely on vibes.

3

In spanish tomatoes are called "hortalizas", the others are "verduras" apart of "frutas", fruits, in english only traduced with vegetables and fruits. Maybe because Spain has a better food culture. Mushrooms are something in between plants and animals in a separate genre, some even are actively moving to find food. The US anyway differences only protein, sugar and decoration, tomatoes in bottles from Heinz.

2
lemmy.today

I dont like mushrooms, maybe this is why... :)

1

I laughed out loud for being downvoted for not liking mushrooms. Lol. :)

1
futurology.today

How about shrimps and lobsters sneaking into the animal club while they are insects? Cockroaches of the sea and shit. Nah mean?

-1

And more importantly, shrimp and lobsters aren't even insects in the first place

7

Shrimps and lobsters shells are made of chitin. Mushrooms are also made of chitin. Coincidence?

4