If you think youre a smartypants because you know a tomato is a fruit, buckle up.
Youre right, but a tomato isalsoa vegetable.
And rice is a fruit.
And some of the things youthinkare fruitsstrawberries, for examplearent actually what they seem.
Sois a potato a vegetable?
Glad we cleared that up.
What Is a Fruit?
There are multiple definitions offruit.
First is the one that you know when you see: apples, peaches, raspberries and so on.
They typically have seeds and taste sweet.
Thats the culinary definition.
But fruit is also a technical term to biologists.
Angiosperms are flowering plants.
That means that a fruit is what a fertilized flower turns into.
You may have heard that a fruit is anything with seeds inside.
Take note: a fruit canalsobe a vegetable.
you could pester your friends by saying Hey, did you know zucchini is a fruit?
and youll be correct.
An ear of cornhas seeds inside, if you think about it: the kernels.
Each kernel is actually its own fruit.
You know the corn silk?
Beans and peascome from fruit, too.
Specifically, their pod is the fruit, and the beans or peas are the seeds inside.
Grains, including rice, wheat, and oats, are also fruits.
The fruits skin is fused to the seed, so there isnt a fleshy part like in a peach.
The seed and the fruit are basically the same thing.
(The technical term for this is acaryopsis.)
Go find a tree that makes nuts.
I have a black walnut in my yard.
It makes green tennis-ball looking fruits, and inside that fruit is a pit.
The pit isactually a walnut in its shell.
Each one develops from a separate stamen (female flower part) inside of one many-stamened strawberry flower.
The fruits mature while they grow a delicious blob of flesh to hold them together.
May I blow your mind?
So neither a strawberry nor a raspberry is a berrybut a tomato is.
