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Is there a vructose, like a veggie-fructose? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 3 days ago by sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

It's more complicated than that — there are two partially overlapping bundles of meaning associated with the word "fruit":

botanical fruit: a part of the plant that contrasts with "stem", "leaf", "root", etc.
culinary fruit: a role for things that are often eaten raw, or cooked for sweet dishes; typically sweet, at most sour. Opposed to "vegetable", "legume", "starch", "dairy", "meat" etc.

Those bundles of meaning could be associated with different words*, but in English they happen to be associated with the same word.

So. Tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers etc. are botanical fruits (sense #1), but they are not culinary fruits (sense #2). With strawberries and rhubarbs being kind of the opposite: culinary-wise they're treated as fruits, but one is a receptacle and the other a petiole (leaf stem).

*Portuguese splits both into "fruto" and "fruta" respectively.