For Release February 1, 2000

AGRI-VIEWS
by Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent

"Is a cucumber a fruit or a vegetable?" the voice on the other end of the phone line asked. I smiled slightly. I’d been down this road before. "Are you asking that question in a strict botanical sense, or as the terms are used in diet and nutrition?" I calmly asked.

Yes, there is a difference. If you look for cucumber in a cookbook, or in most nutrition texts, you will find cucumber under vegetables. In popular usage, myself included, we will refer to most of the products that are grown on annual plants in our gardens as vegetables. We reserve the term fruit for the fleshier products of trees, shrubs and other perennials or produce like the various melons.

If you stop and think about it, we eat a lot of various plant parts. We eat the stems of plants like asparagus. We eat leaf stalks, petioles to be precise, when we enjoy rhubarb. We eat fleshy roots of carrots, radish, onions and parsnips. We eat the leaves of lettuce, cabbage, kale, swiss chard and mustard greens. We eat the flowers of broccoli, cauliflower and artichokes. We eat storage organs, or tubers, of potatoes and sweet potatoes. What do all of the plant parts I just mentioned have in common? None of them contain seeds.

From a purely technical point of view, anytime we eat a plant part that has seeds or should have seeds, we are eating a fruit. If you look up fruit in a botany or plant biology text, you will find some definition like, "a mature seed vessel and its contents, together with accessory parts." Regardless of what congress has said, if you are eating a tomato, you are eating a fruit that is called a berry. You are eating a mature seed vessel and its contents.

By convention, we have grouped different fruits into categories usually based on family relationships. It sometimes makes people uncomfortable to discuss plant fruiting bodies because we use many of the same terms for the reproductive parts including ovary and placenta. In all seeded plants, the developing seed is attached to a tissue that provides sustenance for the developing seed. This tissue is the placenta.

One of the most common fruits, apple, is a member of the rose family. These fruits are called pomes. The other common fruits, cherries, peaches, almond, apricots, etc., are called drupes. Nuts are also fruits, a one seeded, indehiscent dry fruit. A few nuts, like the chestnut, do develop within a husk. Any member of the pea family will have a pod, also known as a legume. This includes peas and beans, of course, but also encompasses such things as redbud, honey locust, alfalfa and clover. Some of these pods split open upon ripening, dehisce, and some do not.

The fruit of most members of the grass family are called a grain or caryopsis. In general we use the term grain if it is of sufficient size to be easily utilized and caryopsis when it is light and chaffy such as with bromegrass, indiangrass and the bluestems. Poppies and iris have a fruit called a capsule. The fruit of the mustards is called a silique (some good crossword puzzle words here!) Many of our trees, including ash and elm, have a fruit (seed) that’s called a samara. The fruit of strawberries and sunflowers is called an achene.

Citrus fruits are a special type of a berry called a hesperidium. Oh, the cucumber, along with its cousins the watermelon, squash, pumpkin and cantaloupe also have a berry like fruit that is called a pepo. Evergreen trees? Yes, they have fruits, but that’s another column worth of material. So is it a fruit or is it a vegetable? It all depends on what you want to know!

-30-

Return to Agri-Views Home Page

Return to Ag Home Page