At our home, we work very hard to live a healthy lifestyle. So I’m always telling my children to eat their vegetables. And the other day, one of them asked, “What is a Vegetable?” I gave them a very simple answer (which made perfect sense to me): “A vegetable is anything we grow in our vegetable garden. ”
Except of course, that isn’t quite true. We grow tomatoes in our vegetable garden. And tomatoes are a fruit. We also grow strawberries – another fruit. The children were quick to point this out.
Which left me looking for a straightforward answer to the seemingly simple question, “What is a vegetable?”
The answer of course is not as simple as the question. Most of the confusion comes down to semantics and whether or not you are asking for the definition of a fruit and vegetable from a scientific or a cooking standpoint.
From a scientific standpoint, true fruits come from the ovary in the base of the flower and contain the seeds of the plant. From this definition, a blueberry would be a fruit, but a strawberry would not (because the strawberry seeds are on the outside and not contained). Technically a strawberry is a “pseudofruit” from a botanical viewpoint. So to scientifically answer the question, “What is a vegetable?” requires some very specific knowledge about botany.
Most people answer the question, “What is a vegetable?” from a cooking standpoint. In which case it mostly refers to the edible parts of plants. One good rule of thumb is that if it contains the seeds it is a fruit and if it doesn’t it is a vegetable.
None of this was very important to my children. What they really wanted to know was not so much, “What is a vegetable?” but “Can’t I eat fruit instead of vegetables?”.
So for us, we don’t really care about the scientific or cooking aspect of vegetables. We care about how sweet it is. Because for our family, fruits are super sweet and therefore desirable. Vegetables on the other hand are tasty, but not as sweet and desirable as fruit.
While fruits provide a lot of powerful nutrients, you do have to be aware that they also contain a lot of fructose. And too much fructose is not always good for you.
So I never really answered the children’s question. But the simple concept of “What is a vegetable?” sparked a lot of good conversation in our house. We talked a lot about why it is important to eat both fruits and vegetables and that you have to eat a variety and not just your favorites.
If you didn’t get a chance to hear it, I had a podcast episode about the importance of eating fruits and vegetables. I talk about some ways of making sure you’re consuming enough. At our house, we try to eat a piece of fruit or a veggie from each of the color groups every day. Here is our list of fruits and vegetables by color. It takes a lot of thought and we don’t always make it. But we try!
