What ARE Bellpeppers, anyway?!?!

[rawandama]

I read on a green smoothie site that bellpeppers, cucumbers, and zucchini's are fruits--but I keep reading in other places that they're vegetables. What are these things anyway??!!

[Rawkinlocs]

They're technically (non-sweet) fruit but are used as veggies.

[RowanC]

The answer depends on your relationship with the two items. If you’re stocking the produce department at a grocery store, a tomato is a vegetable. If you’re a plant scientist—a botanist—a tomato is a fruit. Cucumbers, pumpkins, avocados, and peppers are all fruits. Culturally, however, the grocer is going to call them vegetables.
A fruit is the ripe ovary or ovaries of a flower—the mature ovary of a seed-bearing plant. Let’s say you’ve got a tomato plant with those little yellow flowers all ready. A bee comes along and fertilizes the flower. The flower starts developing into a fruit with the seed inside. (There are four kinds of fruits, which explains fruits such as pineapple and blueberries, but let's not get into that.) And, hey, guess what? Nuts are fruits. True nuts that is, chestnut and filberts come to mind.
Vegetables, however, are the roots (eg, carrot), tubers (eg, potato), leaves (eg spinach), stems (eg, celery), and other bits of plants that you might eat. For a botanist, a vegetable is sort of like the umbrella word for all the edible parts of a plant. Just to keep life interesting, mushrooms aren’t plants at all, they are a kind of fungus.

[rawandama]

Thank you! That's very interesting...still makes me a little angry just because I lost a round in the game "outburst" the other night because I didn't name off bellpeppers and cucumbers as vegetables. *sigh* lol!
Thank you RowanC and Rawkinlocs for your very helpful information!

[JMD]

RowanC!

I can use you in my 5th grade Science class! Your descriptions were great and very articulate.

Nice job!

[ShelShel]

I love stuff like this thread. What helpful...interesting...info. ;)

[RowanC]

Well thanks, but I can't take credit for the verbage. I found it online!

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

[ShelShel]

LOL That's awesome! :D

[Spectatrix]

The confusion is in the difference between botanical and culinary terms. "Fruit" is used both botanically (as RowanC described above) and culinarily, i.e. we typically call peaches, melons, strawberries, etc. "fruit". "Vegetable" is a purely culinary term and generally refers to the non-sweet edible parts of plants, including some botanical fruits (peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers), roots (carrots, parsnips, turnips), leaves (lettuce, cabbage), etc.

In short, all culinary fruits are botanical fruits (unless I'm forgetting some oddball plant...), but botanical fruits may be referred to in culinary parlance as "fruits" or "vegetables", mainly depending on whether they're sweet or not.

[Lay-Lay]

I may be mistaken but was always under the understanding that anything that had seeds in it were fruits which would include squash, tomatoes, peppers, etc....

[Spectatrix]

I may be mistaken but was always under the understanding that anything that had seeds in it were fruits which would include squash, tomatoes, peppers, etc....
Botanically, yes, that's correct. Those that you've named are both fruits (botanical) AND vegetables (culinary)! :D

[Pailani]

As far as food combining, do they combine with fruits or veggies?

[Spectatrix]

As far as food combining, do they combine with fruits or veggies?
Vegetables. As far as I've been able to tell, food combining recommendations use culinary terminology.

[RawNut]

In short, all culinary fruits are botanical fruits (unless I'm forgetting some oddball plant...)

Strawberries are vegetables. The seeds form on the outside and it is the stem, not the ovaries, that turns fleshy and sweet.

RawNut

[ljcoolj]

I'll have to disagree on the strawberries, they come from a flower. Whether or not their seeds are on the inside or the outside really doesn't matter. Any berry is a fruit.

[Grible4]

The fleshy red part of a strawberry is termed an expanded recepticle. The berries are the little seed-like things on the outside. So one expanded recepticle has many berries on it.

[Shivananda]

I may be mistaken but was always under the understanding that anything that had seeds in it were fruits which would include squash, tomatoes, peppers, etc....True, but that's the botanical sense, not the common sense or the legal sense.

Tomatoes, for instance, are botanically classified as fruits, but legally classified as vegetables in the US... here's a citation from Wikipedia:

"In 1887, U.S. tariff laws which imposed a duty on vegetables but not on fruits caused the tomato's status to become a matter of legal importance. The U.S. Supreme Court settled this controversy in 1893, declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, using the popular definition which classifies vegetable by use, that they are generally served with dinner and not dessert. The case is known as Nix v. Hedden."

[RawNut]

"The strawberry is an accessory fruit; that is, the fleshy part is derived not from the ovaries (which are the "seeds", actually achenes) but from the peg at the bottom of the hypanthium that held the ovaries. So from a technical standpoint, the seeds are the actual fruits of the plant, and the flesh of the strawberry is a vegetable." From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry

That's what I learned in school, many moons ago.

Craig