Ok five minute intro culinary botany. So there's a very limited number of organs that plants have. Right? They don't have weird bundles of goo inside them like animals [yuck]. These do not match up to what we call fruits and vegetables in a culinary sense.
There's leaves, stems, roots, flowers, seeds (people mostly know what all of these are) and fruits (people have a very skewed idea of what a fruit is).
We eat all of these as 'vegetables' just often in very odd forms that have been heavily selected upon, and 'vegetable' is just anything not terribly sweet, it can be basically any plant organ.
A carrot is a taproot that stores sugar. Easy 👍 Parsnip, rutabaga, turnip, these are all roots. Spinach, arugula, kale: leaves. Most herbs are aromatic leaves. Celery & rhubarb, leaf stems. Bamboo shoots and sugar cane are stems. Onion, this is where it gets weird, is an underground stem surrounded by a bunch of modified leaves which form a bulb. Potato, not a root, it's a kind of underground storage stem. Ginger & turmeric, also not roots, they're rhizomes, which is a modified, horizontal stem. Most spices (cumin, mace, caraway) are seeds, but there's a lot that aren't. Cinnamon is bark, cloves are dried flower buds. Paprika & chili powder are dried peppers, which of course are a fruit.
Fruits. A fruit is an ovary that develops into a vessel for seeds. The vast majority of fruits in nature are not edible, they are just dry seed pods. Pick a flower—daffodil, iris, poppy, they just have seed pods.
It's also VERY common for fruits to be highly modified or reduced. In grains (wheat, corn, rice, barley, oats), what would develop into a fruit is just an extra layer of tissue around the seed, the pericarp:
We associate fruits with being animal-dispersed because we are animals, but they can also be modified to be wind-dispersed, like the 'wings' of a maple samara:
Anyway if it has seeds inside of it (pumpkin, tomato, cucumber, avocado, chili pepper, okra) it's a fruit, botanically speaking.
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