In everyday life, each person uses fruits, vegetables and berries for food, without really thinking about whether there are cardinal differences between them or not. But the position of biologists on this matter is clearly formed: they know exactly what can be considered a vegetable, and what can be considered a fruit or a berry.
What are vegetables
Ozhegov's dictionary defines vegetables as root crops, bulbous, leafy and some other plants grown on ridges, as well as their fruits themselves. More succinctly, it is the edible part of a plant that grows on the ground and is not a herb, fruit, grain, nut or spice.
All vegetables can be roughly divided into several groups. The first includes root crops. These are well-known carrots, beets, radishes, horseradish, etc. The second - tubers - potatoes, Jerusalem artichoke, sweet potato (sweet potato). The third group is made up of onions - garlic, onions, leeks, shallots, wild garlic and others. The fourth group - cabbage - includes all varieties of cabbage (white cabbage, Savoy, Peking, Chinese - up to 50 species), rapeseed, mustard and wasabi, highly appreciated by lovers of Japanese cuisine. The fifth group is tomato. It includes tomato, pepper, eggplant. The sixth group - legumes - includes beans, peas, chickpeas, soybeans, peanuts, lentils. The representatives of the last seventh group of pumpkin are pumpkin, cucumbers, zucchini, squash.
What are fruits and berries
From the Latin language "fruit" is translated as "fruit". Therefore, the term "fruit" is absent in botany - instead, the term "fruit" is used. By fruit, biologists mean the succulent organs of plants (not necessarily edible), which appear after the flower of the plant has faded, and an ovary has formed in its place. A distinctive feature of fruits is the presence of seeds, it does not matter - large or small, hard or soft. Many vegetables, such as cucumbers, tomatoes, as well as peas and nuts, have these characteristics. Fruits are subdivided into pome fruits (apples, pears), stone fruits (peaches, apricots), citrus fruits (oranges, tangerines, lemons), subtropical and tropical (mango, avocado, pineapple, banana) and melons (watermelon, melon).
A berry in the understanding of botanists is a type of fruit that contains many seeds. Based on this criterion, currants, banana, watermelon, tomato, gooseberry, kiwi and even potatoes can be ranked as berries. But strawberries, strawberries and rose hips are considered by specialists to be false berries, since not only the ovary takes part in fruit development, but also the receptacle - the lower part of the flower, on which the sepals, petals, stamens and pistil are located.
Distinctive features of vegetables, fruits and berries
After analyzing the above, you can deduce several fundamental differences between a vegetable and a fruit. The first is that vegetables are some part of the plant, and fruits are its fruit. The second - the fruit necessarily contains seeds, which can subsequently germinate, thereby giving life to a new plant. A vegetable is only a part of a plant that is completely incapable of reproducing its own kind. Third, fruits grow on plants with a hard or soft stem, vegetables are part of herbaceous plants. Fourth, fruits and berries differ in size and number of seeds.
