Unexpected truth about vegetables

Tomatoes, japaleño peppers, serrano peppers and avocados are currently under scrutiny after Salmonella outbreaks, causing many Americans to worry about eating vegetables.

According to Amy Litt, director of plant genome and Cullman management at the New York Botanical Garden, in fact, all the above products are categorized into fruit groups, whether buyers, sellers and experts. How does nutrition think.

Litt said: ' In my opinion, it's always a mystery. Everyone knows tomatoes are fruit but they don't know that pumpkin or kidney beans or cucumbers are the fruit. I'm not sure how public knowledge views tomatoes as fruit. But all other types are also fruits'.

The store sells fruit of a man at West Side Market, Cleveland.Food prices rose sharply in June with 0.7% more than double the previous month's increase.Vegetable prices rose 6.1% - the largest increase in the last 3 years.(Photo: AP Photo / Mark Duncan).

People have almost no knowledge of these things. In a test vote for 35 people in Manhattan yesterday, about half (18 people) said tomatoes were fruit. But all but one person said that kidney beans are vegetables, while the majority (30 people) say squash is a vegetable.

Avocado, kidney beans, squash, berries, green peppers and okra are actually fruits. On the other hand, the rhubarb is not a fruit.

In the plant world, fruit is a grain-bearing structure of plants. It is made up of flowers. At the central part of the flower, female flowers carry pistil. The ovary contains internal structures that can develop into granules when consumed. So the ovary will develop fruit.

For plants, the basic fruit is a means to disperse seeds into the surrounding environment, mostly thanks to wind or thanks to animals. Fruits such as raspberries become thicker, accumulate sugar and are brightly colored so it attracts birds and other animals to eat. Then 'they will accumulate seeds in their droppings'. In some cases, the fruit is dry and separated. The wind will bring seeds to nearby places to form a new life cycle. An example of this type of dispersion is cotton or fruit.

Esther van der Knaap (left) and students studying under Dr. Na Zhang analyze long tomato shapes and gene variants that regulate the long shape of fruits thanks to a special software program called 'Stool Program Tomato 'development by van der Knapp himself.(Photo: Ken Chamberlain, CommTech, Ohio State University)

What about vegetables?

Litt explained that the word 'vegetable' doesn't mean botanical - studying plants. In fact, it is also classified, like fruit, based on the characteristics of their plant structure: which parts of the tree do they belong to? For example, rhubarb or celery are petioles, although they are very long and contain water.

Lettuce, kale, spinach or cabbage are leaves.

A man is selling pineapples to customers in Yangon City (Myanmar).Many local dishes and fruits are sold on the city's sidewalk.(Photo: AP)

What about vegetables? Beans are more recognizable because in this case the buyer's language matches the botany. Legumes have all fruit-like characteristics. A bean is also called legumes. Examples include beans, kidney beans or peas. All are fruits.

Peas (in addition to fire beans, green beans, vetch) can fool you. They are fleshy and unlike their bodies or leaves, but they are not fruits. Beans or beans are seeds. They all grow in the same shell, which is the fruit, and they contain lots of protein. Bean plants and bean pods are collectively referred to as legumes.

Berries are very complicated

Berries are berries. Plant research experts also agree with us on this management point. For them, berries are meat fruits that contain many seeds inside, attached to the pistil like blueberries.

But strangely, tomatoes, tomato fruits, grapes, yellow persimmons and peppers are all considered berries for botanical experts.

So guess what fruit is not a berry? It is strawberries, raspberries, mulberry and black berries. They are actually double fruits because they form the fruiting bodies from many separate ovaries rather than blending into a unified structure.

Berries and double fruits (Photo: 1001recipe)

Strawberries have seeds outside, which is very strange. With regular fruits such as apples or peaches, seeds are inside the fruit and are surrounded by layers of ovary. The same is true of blueberries. But with strawberries alone, 'the ovary becomes loose, the big part is the tissues below the oocyte structure.

Litt explained: 'When that part grows in size, it isolates all particles together and stops outside the fruit'.

An example developed in the other direction is the pineapple. It is called multipurpose . Each fruit is actually a group of small fruits, formed by the ovaries of many different flowers combined together.

Litt said: 'There are many different types of fruit. And there are also many, many different distortions of a fruit. '