Because this is Hacker News, the discussion would be incomplete without a link to the Supreme Court case Nix v. Hedden[1].
After the Tariff Act of 1883 taxed vegetables (but not fruits), produce seller John Nix — no relation to the package manager — sued to get tomatoes classified as a fruit.
The court held that the “common meaning” mattered more than the botanical one:
“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.“
If you’re in New York, you can celebrate Nix’s memory by eating at a fancy vegetarian restaurant[2], or, of course, you can just use the package manager or operating system.
I carry an apple to work every day with black pepper & salt pouches from Taco Bell, & my american co-workers have asked me why I sprinkle salt on fruit? I explain them we sprinkle salt on apples, banana, guava, pineapple, watermelon, cucumber, tomatoes, onion, oranges and many other things.
Black salt is not tangy like lemony, it is just rock salt. Sometimes fruitsalts are salts peppered with ground black pepper and or lemon juice. Black salt on its own is earthly salty like ocean water.
guava + black salt is an incredible combo. Sadly, it's very hard to get good guava here in bay area. If anyone knows a good place, I am all ears. I love the the green raw guava more than the white-ish ripe ones.
Any Indian Grocery Store in bay area, in Guava season like summer. Some example chain stores are New India Bazar, India Cash & Carry, and many other single store. I sold these all of this last year as a Cashier, and in cheap as Apples.
Apart from green raw, white ripe, we also had pinkish ripe guava in India. Eating Guava or chewing Guava leaves helped me in mouth sores when I was a kid.
Cantaloupe with jamón (cured pork ham) for lunch and tostada con aceite y tomate (tomato rubbed on a toast with olive oil) for breakfast are both everyday treats in menus in Spain.
Funny story: my first night in Italy (a country where I would go on to spend years, get married and have kids) they served "prosciutto con melone" - cured ham with cantaloupe at the place I was staying.
To this day I love prosciutto, and I like melons, but I can't stand the taste of them together.
That first evening there, I was really worried that all I had heard about how good Italian food was maybe not true - perhaps it was all strange things like what they'd just given me?
It has larger grains. It is called "kosher" salt because larger grain salt (typically coarser than even typical kosher salt) is used to drain the blood from meat and fowl, a necessary step in rendering it kosher by Jewish law.
It's a larger crystal, which makes it easier for the salt to pull water out of the watermelon, versus (I'm guessing) just making its way into the watermelon as a dissolved solid.
My understanding for the mechanism by which the salt makes the fruit sweeter is by increasing the concentration of sugars in the flesh that's now surrounded by salted water.
Kosher salt is named for the application of drawing water from meat (which is itself part of the kosher preparation of meat) so it's not too surprising that the salt is also well suited for drawing water from fruits like watermelon.
I use table salt on watermelon and it's great too. I can believe that kosher salt would be better, but I doubt most people would consider the difference immense. But palates vary, so, if you've got both salts around might as well use the bigger crystal.
But also it doesn't have additives like table salt (e.g. iodine and anti-caking agents). Iodine at least has a definite flavor.
It's also very consistently made (though not between manufacturers) unlike some sea salts, and relatively inexpensive so it's the go-to kitchen salt (as against finishing salt) for a lot of cooks; you know what you get in a pinch every time.
Yes !! Tomate à la croque au sel as we call'em !! First time I ate a tomato like that in the US, my american friends made so much fun of me "yo, no way brooo ! he's eating a tomato like an apple, da'fu !! Weird frenchman !!".
I still eat my tomatoes like that every so often, it's so good ! Although I think I end up eating quite a bit of salt when I do that which isn't so good...
In my head the biggest problem with this is that tomatoes are very liquidy and that seems like a very messy proposition.
Obviously, sliced tomatoes with salt is a relatively common breakfast side item, so the idea of just eating tomato with salt isn't that uncommon in the U.S.
Eat enough of them, and you'll develop the proper technique - do the initial bite slowly and carefully, while gouging the internal pressure. You might need to try another spot. Then immediately suck the interior. Then proceed eating them one pocket at a time, while occasionally sucking any free floating liquid.
Waffle House, one of the larger chains of grill made food offer sliced tomatoes as a side in place of hash browns. I have no found that offering elsewhere. So it makes me wonder how it made to the menu
Salt is fine... in general you're more likely to get too little salt than too much, and the difference in your blood pressure between the two isn't that significant.
I love tomatoes. They are seriously one of the best foods that exist, but I do find they can be messy, so I really enjoy a large plate of thinly sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper more evenly distributed as an alternative to this. Very cool to learn the French name for this though!
A few other things great with salt and pepper: grapefruit, watermelon, cantelope, cottage cheese, buttermilk.
If it's just large tomatoes, people often cut them into slices and then salt them. Or cube them along with cucumber, or halve them if they are cherry tomatoes
You add salt as you eat on the exposed portion. You can try putting salt on the initial bite spot, most of it will fall away, a bit will remain though.
The average US tomato was bred for mass shipping and tastes like wet cardboard. Try an heirloom tomato, or something else less mass produce at a farmers market - they taste completely different.
I find the article pleasant in its writting and humour. For me this goes to show that thin clickbait articles can be interesting, it's just that most people who can write don't usually do clickbait. Excerpt:
> The technical definition of a berry is "a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary." If you're not too familiar with botany, this definition probably isn't helpful at all. But once you learn that oranges and tomatoes fit that definition to a T and could therefore be considered berries, you may start to question reality.
> Go a step further and find out that strawberries — yes, those delicious red fruits with "berries" literally in the name — aren't officially berries either. They're "accessory fruits," meaning the flesh that surrounds the seed doesn't actually come from the plant's ovaries but from the ovaries' receptacle. Didn't think we'd be talking so much about ovaries in this article, did you? By the way, raspberries aren't really berries either. I'll let you take a minute to collect yourself.
As one commented mentioned these "nut allergies" can be psychosomatic, where the mind is literally triggering the physical reactions based purely on expectation.
On the other hand "nuts" including peanuts are typically processed in the same facilities, so cross-contamination is real too.
I'm curious how the botanical definition came about. I believe "berry" comes from a word that means "grape" (which are berries in the botanical sense).
In Middle English, everything that wasn't a berry was an "apple". A banana was an appel of paradis, apple of paradise.
This still lives on; in Swedish for instance, orange is apelsin, which comes from "apple from China". Pomegranate comes from "pomme", French for apple, and "granatum" meaning it has many seeds (grenade actually comes from the fruit, because it looks like one).
Potatoes are "pommes du terre" in French, meaning "earth apples", and French fries are "pommes frites", fried apples.
The problem is that the people who name things don't always have enough knowledge to name them properly. And once a name has stuck, even if it's technically incorrect, it ain't gonna change.
And sometimes the technical crowd gets a little bit carried away when they narrow definitions. For instance, although its name was the very origin of the term, Stonehenge no longer qualifies as a henge.
In botanic this may only apply to Latin, and even in this case it would be stretched IMO. But taking English as the only reference point is a bit imperialistic to say the least.
There's a very good video on this [1] by Innuendo Studios on why this discussion is more or subjective, since it matters in what context you say it and what you mean by it.
He does this with the example of a tomato, which by botanical defintion is a fruit. But in culinary terms, it is a vegetable. So when someone says "haha, did you know that a tomato is actually a fruit", it's subjective and can almost have no added value in a discussion. Botanists know it's a fruit. Cooks know the taste of the tomato and will use it accordingly. Hence, nothing is gained. Except confusion and unnecessary discussion.
People who write code for robot compilers (aka programmers) often make this mistake. People who write code for human compilers (aka writers) embrace the subjectivity/variability of those human compilers
You forget one subcategory of writers: lawyers (and their subcategory legislators). They definitely reject variability of interpretation as much as they can, or at least try their hardest to.
I think lawyers fundamentally premise their work on the variability of interpretation. They make arguments in favor of certain interpretations, and take pains in the texts they write to preempt any undesirable interpretations.
Legislators may or may not think like writers/lawyers, but even if they do they're constrained by those who don't, the need for compromise, and the incentive to have gotten something done even if it's not perfect. So they sometimes end up doing a bad job of legal writing.
In my experience, this is how programmers think lawyers work, and it's why so many programmers frustrate actual lawyers by thinking they can use pure robotic logic to decide on the legality of something (or to find clever loopholes that no human judge would ever actually allow).
As a law student myself I have to disgree. While in many cases legislators want no variability of interpretetion, in some few cases variability is intended (for bad reasons, mostly).
Lawyers actually like variability of interpretation, since it allows for flexible arguments. This is especially true for common law countries, where law is systematically interpreted by the courts, very often following arguments of lawyers and/or scholars.
You see, language is a social construct and can never be as accurate as mathematics. You can define an interger very rigourously, but you cannot define language that way. Yes, there is grammar and such things. But it‘s very dynamic. And I didn‘t even start with „meaning“. There‘s a very large debate in philosophy about what that even is.
> Cooks know the taste of the tomato and will use it accordingly.
this is an exceptionally simplistic view since tomato is readily available as juice, as opposed as zucchini and peppers, whose are seldom used in cocktails that aren't smoothies
I think this is merely a flaw with the English language. Tomatoes are fruits (fruit of the tomato plant) but they are not fruit (a food category). It's two separate words with different grammatical treatment.
> Berries also must have two or more seeds, and their fruit must develop from a flower with one ovary. Once again, the banana checks those boxes. And, weirdly, so does the tomato, eggplant, kiwi and pepper. Oranges are a specific type of berry called hesperidium thanks to their distinct segments.
Just to throw some extra confusion into the mix :-)
I saw a chat show once where there was a debate as to whether a tomato was a fruit or vegetable. The person arguing for them as a fruit challenged the other party to eat them with custard. The producers then got someone to make up some custard and brought it in bowls with some tomatoes for them to eat.
They ended up quite enjoying them, but I have never been tempted to try it lol
It's just wordplay, a basic pun, because the same word, "berry", appears in two different contexts. In everyday usage, a strawberry is a berry, but in botany it's not.
If you're doing botany, you should probably use the latin term Fragaria instead of strawberry.
Edit: If you like this, you'll also find interesting that many nuts (hazlenuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pecans, almonds) are not nuts but seeds. One of the few actual nuts is a chestnut.
Also, coffee beans are not beans, but the pit (that usually comes in two parts) of the coffee fruit. It's the same with cocoa beans, but with 30-50 seeds per fruit.
That depends on what you mean by "edible". Coffee cherries aren't particularly pleasant, at least not for human tastes, but they're strictly edible. Palm civets seem to like 'em, but not enough to make kopi luak cheap.
If you can find it, there's an episode of the BBC comedy panel show "Unbelievable Truth" where they list all the nuts that aren't nuts. Entertaining and surprising.
The bit we eat is usually a seed or fruit - the shell encasing it is a nut. At least, that's what I understood.
Pun - A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word.
When we say "a strawberry is not a berry" we're playing on the different meanings of the word berry. It's not a humourous pun, but I would still call it a pun.
There is no “play” here. Pedantically correcting people isn’t fun. There is no humor in it. Puns require humor/play.
Also, correcting people to say that bananas are berries doesn’t even acknowledge a second meaning of berry. It suggests the meaning they know of is wrong. I’m aware we’re talking about a technical meaning and a commonly-accepted meaning, but the assertion is suggesting the commonly-accepted meaning is completely invalid.
I guess it’s interesting in that you can learn something about botany.
However, culinary definitions (where strawberries are berries and tomatoes are vegetables) are just as valid and not wrong because botanical definitions seemingly contradict them.
Bananas can both be berries and not berries at the same time and both definitions can be valid, what’s most useful then just depends on the context (and for most people most of the time that context is, by the way, a culinary one and not a botanical one).
Yes, you learn something about its biological function. The biological definition of “fruit” tells you where the offspring of a plant grows out of. For example, the actual fruits of the strawberry plant are the little seeds at the surface of each strawberry.
Sure, but that doesn’t require collapsing the word to just one meaning as the article implies. Why acknowledge the biological meaning over the vulgar one?
For botanists yes it makes a huge difference. For people, they are going to group food more in how it is cooked, used, tastes than what it's taxonomic placement is. So the answer is yes and no.
That strawberries are not true berries becomes fairly obvious once you learn that tomatoes are berries. All berries seem to have fairly watery flesh surrounded by a thin but tough skin. Tomatoes have both, strawberries have neither. Raspberries superficially look like a collection of tiny berries from this perspective. Bananas have a skin, but it's not thin, and their flesh is not watery.
That's just my layman's analysis, though. It's suited me well for many years, but if now eggplants and peppers are also berries, I'm starting to wonder whether the word berry even means anything.
There's a deeper point here about how scientific taxonomies differ from folk taxonomies. Scientists might decide to classify something based on its genetic makeup or microscopic structure, whereas laypeople will classify based on macroscopic appearance or use or taste. Neither one of these is closer to the absolute truth, they are both just heuristics useful in different contexts.
Yeah and cucumbers are fruit, birds are dinosaurs, ladybugs are not bugs, peanuts are not nuts, etc.
Sometimes I think that scientists should just stick to taxonomic categories or other words that don't conflict with their "common usage" meanings.
(and while we all seem to agree that whales aren't fish, they are certainly within the "bony fish" clade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteichthyes and are a lot closer relatives to a goldfish than are sharks :) )
Mammals are tetrapods, which are indeed under Osteichthyes (unless you consider Ostreichtyes to be paraphyletic).
If you look at the cladogram on the wikipedia page I linked, you see a picture of a salamander near the top representing the category Tetrapodomorpha. We (and whales) are also on that branch. Sharks are outside of that whole cladogram, as they are cartilaginous fish. ( * )
In other words, any clade which includes all bony fish also includes mammals.
[*] which means that the most recent common ancestor of sharks and goldfish lived longer ago than the most recent common ancestor of whales and goldfish
That will redirect from "bony fish" to "Osteichthyes", the name of the scientific category that represents bony fish.
And there is a cladogram on that page. And it includes whales, by virtue of including tetrapods (it shows a picture of a salamander).
It also says on that page "Osteichthyes can be compared to Euteleostomi. In paleontology, the terms are synonymous." And "Euteleostomi presents a cladistic view which includes the terrestrial tetrapods that evolved from lobe-finned fish". And yes, as mentioned, whales are tetrapods.
So, while I didn't say "whales are bony fish", I said "whales are members of the bony fish clade", and I'd say wikipedia agrees with that statement. (to be clear, we humans are also members of the bony fish clade) And if you consider bony fish to be a paraphyletic group, well, then it isn't a clade.
Similarly, the botanical definition of "nut" excludes basically everything we think of nuts. Pedants seemed to have learned that peanuts are "not nuts" but have yet to pick up on that almonds, pistachios, walnuts and pecans are also "not nuts."
Read the article and the botanical classifications of some of these fruits feels like a weirdly broken and clearly unacceptable "it-works-as-intended" bug. The classifications should in many ways align with the every-day use of the same words. That is, unless the language changes so much that most of the same words end up meaning an opposite of what they historically meant, or something completely different from the same. In that case, the botanical classification could be kept.
Then you'd have to redefine what a berry is. Do we just have a list of things that are berries? If so, who get to define that list? What if you forget one? Would that thing then not a berry anymore?
You'd could also try to make so criteria that defines berries, but that's what we already have, even though it tells us that strawberries aren't berries. We could make new ones, but how do we ensure that bananas becomes fruit, strawberries should be a berry and peas and corn should definitively not become berries?
For daily usage it fine that we don't see bananas as berries and that tomatoes certainly shouldn't go into a fruit salad, even if it's technically a fruit.
Why? I don't see pressing need for a waterproof definition. I'd think for general use "I know it when I see it" definition suffices, and for where exactitude matters having explicit list is better anyways
No. Cooking doesn't reduce the amount of toxin in potatoes very much. Potatoes are toxic when green, although this varies massively among the varieties. But a general rule to follow for potatoes is if they are green then don't eat them.
Not really a great article because it mostly perpetuates the confusion rather than clears it up.
Context determines whether a strawberry is a berry or not. In common usage it is. Using a scientific horticultural definition it is not. Context usually determines which definition of berry applies implicitly, though if you're communicating in a context where you think it's reasonably ambiguous, you can be explicitly about which definition you're using.
Nothing in particular about putting tomato sauce on pizza should make it less nutritious. Legislation should be targeting nutritional facts, not presentation. The article you link shows that nutritionally speaking, it wasn't an unreasonable ruling.
Wow did you even read the title of the article you posted? Here it is:
>No, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable
Congress decided that 1/8th of a cup of tomato puree counts as a SERVING of vegetables. Not A vegetable. You're just intentionally saying something stupid in order to attempt to project that stupidity on someone else.
In french, we have the word "Baie", which means berry, but is not widely used for fruits, and we also have another expression which is much more used, "Fruits rouges", literally "red fruits". I think it covers more accurately fruits like raspberries, strawberries, and others. I don't know if "red fruits" is also used in english.
Yp, we have that as well but it's very informal, you won't usually see it on product packaging but at home I'll ask one of my kids for a glass of 'red juice'. 'Forest Fruits' is a common generic name for a mix of red berry juices or fruits.
Especially when there is conflict between domain terminology and coding concepts.
For example my company at large refers to Booleans (meaning search expressions that are vaguely Boolean in nature in our sense, that job boards enable for CV searching).
Ultimately mutual understanding trumps being correct in my view.
That said, when I have to weigh vegetables in supermarket I still pause before selecting the vegetable category to weigh tomatoes.
I wish this article went a bit deeper. I still don't feel like I have a primary grip on WHY the non-berry items ended up with berry names to begin with. Bananas, okay, late-period adoption, but the rest?
2010: EU subsidizes fisheries. France wanted in on the action. European Commission has officially categorized snails as "inland fish" in order to allow French snail farmers to receive subsidies.
2002: Fruit jams are subsidized in EU. Portugal makes carrot jams. Guess what, carrot is a fruit in EU. Let me cite that for you:
'tomatoes, the edible parts of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water-melons are considered to be fruit'
One of the many questions the article leaves open is what (if any) fruit called "berries" are actually berries? I did some quick research, and apparently cranberries, blueberries, lingonberries and huckleberries are also "botanical berries" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry#Botanical_definition)...
The word "berry" goes back to proto-Germanic. Outside the context of botany, it means "small fruit". (And even in the 9th century, it meant "small fruit", though at the time it was more strongly associated with grapes than it is now.)
Carl Linnaeus lived in the 18th century. The botanical sense of "berry" developed from the ordinary sense -- almost certainly because someone was investigating "what do all these berries have in common?", and picked a trait that identified the largest number of small fruit.
You can see the same thing happening with "fish". Starfish and jellyfish are not "fish" in a taxonomic sense, but they are things that live in the water. In Chinese, octopuses and crocodiles are also "fish". (章鱼 and 鳄鱼, where 鱼 by itself is "fish".)
The world "berry" and "fruit" have both a technical botanist definition, and a culinary definition.
Like okra is a fruit from a botany perspective but not a culinary one. If you asked for a fruit smoothie and received an okra smoothie on I imagine you wouldn't be happy.
I’m surprised this is news to anyone. Context always matters. Is the conventional wisdom that there is Not two dichotomies for produce: culinary and botanical?
I read up on these things some time ago, and what amused me the most is that while almost every vegetable is a fruit, the Juniper berry is, in fact, a cone.
After the Tariff Act of 1883 taxed vegetables (but not fruits), produce seller John Nix — no relation to the package manager — sued to get tomatoes classified as a fruit.
The court held that the “common meaning” mattered more than the botanical one:
“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.“
If you’re in New York, you can celebrate Nix’s memory by eating at a fancy vegetarian restaurant[2], or, of course, you can just use the package manager or operating system.
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/149/304/ , or see the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden [2] http://www.nixny.com/