something I explained to my brother yesterday that rocked his world: it’s not that scientists can’t decide whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, nor is it that it’s “really” one or the other. It’s both, because we’re talking about two different categorization schemes.
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit. A fruit is scientifically defined as the part of a plant that develops from the ovary after flowering and surrounds the seeds. It’s defined by its structure and function. In botanical categorization, apples, peaches, grapes, tomatoes, bananas, avocados, pumpkins, peppers, and corn kernels are fruits.
Culinarily, a tomato is a vegetable, because it’s a plant food that is neither starchy nor sweet and you usually don’t just eat it raw. Vegetables are culinarily defined by their flavor and how you cook them. In culinary categorization, any part of a plant can be a vegetable: roots (carrots, parsnips), leaves (lettuce, kale), stems (celery), seeds (peas, lima beans), and yes fruits (tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins). In culinary categorization, “fruits” are usually botanical fruits, though occasionally they are other parts of the plant instead, as long as they’re juicy and sweet (strawberries are actually the stems of a plant; the ovaries surrounding the seeds are the little seeds on the outside! Pineapples and figs are a weird flower-ovary fusion called multiple inflorescence!)
These are simply two different categorizational schemes that through the weirdness of historical linguistics use the same word “fruit” to mean different segments of the totality of plants. Neither is incorrect, because they are two different ways of categorizing plants for two different purposes.
Categories aren’t “real.” Categories don’t exist in nature. Things exist in nature, plants exist in nature, rocks and animals and genes and hormones and human experiences exist in nature. And humans look at the totality of everything and we come up with names and categories to sort and understand them. A category is not real; it is only useful or not useful. Botanical categories are useful for different reasons than culinary categories are, but they’re both useful ways to break up and understand the world. And they are useful in their own contexts, and may not be useful in other contexts. Botany has no use for defining what is and isn’t a “vegetable” so that’s just not a category in scientific botany. It’s a useful category for low-sweetness low-starch plant parts you cook in order to eat, though.
And we put everything into categories, and we have reasons for categorizing things the way we do—but we choose what traits are important to group by, and what traits aren’t. Vegetables, nuts, fruits, and grains are culinary plant food categories. And some categories are silly, like “is a taco a sandwich?” That’s a categorization game: what traits do we decide make an individual item part of the category or not?
But we categorize other things too. Sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, DSM diagnosis. Age categories such as senior/adult/teenager/child/toddler/infant, or age categories like adult/minor. These are all categorization schemes where humans decided what the categories are and what traits make an individual count as one thing or another. And then we decided how to treat people based on the category we assigned them to. The traits (such as hormones, genital shape, number of years having lived, brain neurochemistry, place where you were born, desire for a romantic relationship with people of a certain gender, desire for a sexual relationship with people of a certain gender…) are real. The categories are how we prioritize, classify, and understand them. Are the categories useful? Or are they not useful? In what contexts are they useful and in what contexts are they not? And what are the effects of playing “is a taco a sandwich? Is a tomato a fruit?” type categorization games with people?
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