Since the ripe old age of five, you’ve been told to eat your fruits and veggies, but things got confusing when one of your elementary school friends shattered your world by informing you that tomatoes are actually fruits. Your whole life, you discovered, was a lie. Holdup: there are more imposter vegetables that actually play for the other team. The following is a list that will make you question every vegetable that you’ve ever eaten (because they’re all actually fruits):
Eggplants (apparently a berry)
Olives
Avocadoes
Pumpkins
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Bell peppers
Corn
Beans
Peas
In the likely event of an emergency where you need to rapidly determine whether something is a fruit or vegetable, it’s not too difficult. Fruits are technically the seeds of a plant, so any other edible parts of a plant mean it’s a vegetable. Also, vegetables are used in cooked meals a lot more than fruits are.
Here’s the link to a super fun quiz to test your expertise. There is a distinction between the culinary and botanical grouping of fruits and vegetables, so next time your parents yell at you to eat all your tomatoes because you need vegetables, you can fight back with the scientific, botanical argument that tomatoes are not vegetables. Therefore, you can’t morally eat your mom’s weird roasted tomatoes.