this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
3 points (71.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

3520 readers
54 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.


Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!


Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I’ll counter with another question: are tomatoes and peppers fruit or vegetables?

Sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose, so anything that contains sucrose contains fructose bound to glucose.

And just like fructose isn’t directly related to fruit, glucose isn’t directly related to glue. And sucrose doesn’t come from suits.

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

are tomatoes and peppers fruit or vegetables?

they are both. fruit is a classification based on the part of a plant (stem, leaf, fruit, etc.), while vegetable groups them by how they can be used.

[–] 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":

  1. botanical fruit: a part of the plant that contrasts with "stem", "leaf", "root", etc.
  2. 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)