"Are red pandas carnivores or herbivores?" "They eat like 80% bamboo, so herbivores." "Wrong! They are taxonomically in the order carnivora, making them carnivores! Please ignore that carnivore also just means meat eater and herbivore isn't even a taxonomic clade. People only ever talk to me to get mad at this switching between casual and scientific definitions, I am nothing without it."
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Sure, but they are fun guys!
Fun-gu(y)s
Tomatoes are fun guys indeed.
Always dismiss those people who talk about how tomatoes are fruits as nerds. The category "vegetable" in the kitchen usually refers to more savory plants, not that what part of the fruit it is. Also if you're still one of those "um, ackchually, tomatoes are fruits" kind of people, then eat tomatoes like apples. Maybe even some chili peppers too, they're berries.
It's just interesting that there's a distinction between botanical and culinary classification. Once you realise that there are two different systems that don't necessarily need to completely agree then it's not a big deal.
...also, what exactly is wrong with taking a bite out of a tomato like an apple? They're delicious.
Vegetables aren't even a thing botanically, they're basically "plant stuff that isn't fruit", except when it is.
Botanically speaking, vegetables can be roots (carrots, beets), stems (celery, asparagus), leaves (spinach, lettuce), flowers (broccoli, cauliflower) seeds (peas, beans), and of course fruits that we treat as savory (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants).
And then on the opposite side you have things we call fruits that botanically speaking aren't. Rhubarb is a stem, strawberries are aggregate accessory fruits where the fleshy part we eat is actually swollen stem tissue, and those little "seeds" on the outside are the real fruits of the plant. Figs are not simple fruits, they're inverted flower clusters where the "fruit" is actually a hollow stem containing many tiny real fruits inside.
Even apples and pears aren't true fruits botanically, they're accessory fruits where much of what we eat comes from the flower's receptacle rather than just the ovary.
So yeah the botanical vs. culinary divide works both ways. Our everyday food categories are really more about taste, texture, and how we use foods rather than plant biology.
Who the hell calls rhubarb a fruit?
This is the kind of guy who eats tomatoes as fruits
Do you want to be like that guy?
I agree, salads are morally reprehensible
As someone who thinks tomatoes are vegetables, I would eat more tomatoes like apples if they didn't give me canker sores every time.
Tomatoes and fruits are a great litmus test (no pun intended) to see if a person can recognize the domain of their knowledge. Some people glomp onto a fact that is correct in some scenarios and use it as an "umm actually" where it isn't appropriate or even correct (like the definition of racism)
My driving instructor ate tomatoes like apples, got a whole wooden crate of them in the morning and a shaker of salt, I probably could've mowed down a few pedestrians as long as that man had his tomatoes.
unironically tho eating tomatoes straight up is pretty fire
A burger meal is mostly vegetable and fruits, with a thin slice of meat. served with vegetable potatoes (fries), vegetable hot sauce, and a vegetable drink filled with the vegetable corn syrup.
Leave mycelium alone
Why is it yourcelium
Better check your privilegelium
Actually, "mushrooms are technically meat" is a new hill I'd like to die on. Mushrooms have animal cells, ergo, definitely not a vegetable.
They don't, they're a distinct third thing with a distinct third type of cells
They are, however, more closely related to us animals than they are to plants. As in, our last common ancestor is less far back.
Also, unrelated to your comment, but related to the post: vegetable isn't a botanical term, but a culinary term. So, there's no bioligical basis for vegetable in the first place, so there's no issue with counting mushrooms among them. Sure, it's a bit inconvenient that the word 'fruit' is both a culinary and a botanical term in English, and there's overlap to it, but that doesn't mean it's somehow illogical that some things are culinarilu fruits but not botanically, and vice versa.
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