this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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What? Who’s calling pumpkins, squashes, and cucumbers vegetables?
And no one calls mushrooms vegetables: mushrooms are mushrooms.
People putting them in salads, for one.
People putting things into salads need to chill out.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, salt, pepper, bacon, eggs, dressing, croutons, cheese, olives, olive oil, vinegar, peppers, salsa, chicken, steak, tortilla chips, limes, chow mien noodles, etc. are all things one might put in a salad that aren’t vegetables. You don’t have to label everything vegetables just because there’s some lettuce in there.
What exactly is a vegetable, by your definition?
As others point out, vegetable is a culinary term; fruit is a botanical and culinary term.
Any edible non-fruit part of a plant. I’ll also make exceptions for nonstandard fruits like pods and kernels.
Why are fruit special though? Leaves and roots are also part of a plant, so why would a tomato not be a vegetable, but lettuce (leaf) and carrot (root) get exemptions?
Because we all collectively decided fruit were their own thing? They’re the juicy snack plants give away to trick animals into spreading their seeds.
I’m not sure why the ancient chefs decided to be silly. They should have just called it all “plants” and be done with it.
As the other comment implied, salads are a poor gauge as to whether something is treated as a vegetable.
Better to use a crudité. And button mushrooms (which are the same species as portabello!) belong in a crudité.
"Vegetable" is a culinary term. It does not mean "plant", it is not the opposite of the botanical "fruit". It means "We use this in culinary traditions similarly to other vegetables".
Pumpkin, Squash and Mushrooms all fit into soup and not into fruit salads, so they're all vegetables. Cucumbers are veggies for fitting into actual salads, though they're only like a few good decades of selective breeding away from being full culinary fruits. These are not exact definitions, but, like most things in life, messy definitions are often the more useful ones.
Since "vegetable" only has a definition as a culinary term, I really don't get why people get so hung up on it. It's not like "nut" or "berry", whose culinary a botanical definitions couldn't be in more of a disagreement.
Badgers.
Mushroom mushroom.
Cucumbers are too vegetablish. They're like gourds.
Legislators, to tax them more