Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Food & Drink

What's that mushroom doing in my fruit salad?

By Glenda Bartosh

We all know the uncle who delivers the conversation stopper at the dining table when sliced tomatoes are served. He looks the kids dead in the eyeballs and says, “Hey, Helen, what the heck are ya doing serving fruit with the roast beef?” Amidst much giggling and chortling, Uncle Buncle then goes on to insist that tomatoes are really a fruit, not a vegetable, while all the kids are going, “Nah, no way!”

I kind of felt like one of those kids again, pinned down by Uncle Buncle’s stare, when I researched strawberries for last week’s column and found out that the achenes (pronounced ay-keens, accent on the second syllable) — the tiny dark flecks most of us think of as the seeds that dot the surface of the strawberry — are really the fruit.

An achene is a small, dry, indehiscent one-seeded fruit with a thin wall. “Indehiscent” means it does not open on its own at maturity (like some people’s minds I know — sorry), as in the well-sealed, dark-coloured achene of a sunflower.

A fruit, by stripped-down definition, is the ripened ovary of a plant. Depending on which dictionary you consult, it must contain the seeds of the plant, it can include the seeds of the plant (but then how do we classify zucchinis, or squash? Read on…), and it often includes the sweet fleshy parts we normally associate with fruits. We have come by custom, not necessarily fact, to call any juicy, sweet, fleshy bits associated with achenes the fruit — including nuts and strawberries — and conveniently overlook the complex botany of the matter.

But just to complicate things a little more, strawberries, as well as blackberries and raspberries, are really not berries at all; rather, they are brambles. Brambles are aggregate composites of fruits, or a lot of little fruits bunched together. That’s right, each one of those teeny juicy sacs — called “drupelets” (now there’s a good name to insult someone with) — that make up a single raspberry is actually a single fruit that is part of a larger structure called a “bramble”.

This term was much more familiar to people from the Old World and those from a few generations back. “Don’t get caught in the brambleberry bushes!” was a familiar warning to all and sundry out picking wild berries. The term “brambleberry” is still used once in a while, but mainly when referring to blackberries. Personally I always preferred the made-up “beebleberry bushes”, which first came into my consciousness reading a Little Lulu comic book. They continue to appear sporadically in other invented worlds as a kind of trope for a silly, invented place, but don’t ask me what they taste or look like.

On the whole, the mix-up over fruits vs. veggies is entirely due to the collision between the world of science and the world of cooking and eating. Rhubarb, for instance is the stem of the plant, and so removed as it is from any semblance of an ovary, could never pass in the fruit kingdom. It even flirts ominously with one of the prerequisites of the classic definition of vegetables: the parts of a plant, such as the leaves, stems, and roots, that are edible. But because we use it in making sweet desserts, voila, it passes as fruit.

And while tomatoes are the fruit of the plant, we primarily use them as “vegetables”, which really isn’t a scientific term at all but one of cooking and eating and custom, also defined as simply describing any edible part of a plant that is not a fruit. And that’s something like defining Canadians as any North Americans who aren’t, well, “American”, though a friend argues that anyone living in any of the Americas is technically an American and we should start using the term as such.

As for the vexing tomato, its confusing identity is lodged forever in a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1883 brought forth by three Nixes, a bevy of exporters, who questioned whether the tomato was a fruit or veggie as tariffs were paid on the former but not the latter. The court, surprisingly, ruled in favour of the tomato as vegetable, which generated no taxes but was in keeping with common meaning and, some might argue, common sense and set the stage for all time for Uncle Buncles everywhere.

Another definition for fruit is “the fertile, often spore-bearing structure of a plant that does not bear seeds,” and here’s where things can get really interesting. According the Gourmet Mushrooms’ website, the mushroom is a fruit, much like the apple, which really isn’t a fruit but a “pome”, wherein the “fruit” is really the core and the outside part (the carpels) is much like the strawberry, an enlarged juicy bit we like to eat. Pears and quinces are also pomes; regardless, the term certainly helps us understand how the French “ pomme ” arose for “apple”.

Wikipedia can shake up a few assumptions and produce department managers with its explanation of “berries”: the most common type of simple fleshy fruit ; a fruit in which the entire ovary wall ripens into an edible pericarp . Examples of botanical berries include the tomato , grape , litchi , loquat , plantain , avocado , persimmon , eggplant , guava , uchuva (ground cherry), and chili pepper.

The fruit of citrus , such as the orange , kumquat and lemon , is a modified berry called a hesperidium ; the fruit of cucumbers and their relatives — squash, pumpkins, gourds, cantaloupes, and watermelon — are all modified berries, ones called “ pepoes ”. Mind you, Wikipedia allows that bananas, squash and pumpkins are “false berries”, but so are currants, blueberries and gooseberries.

So now we’ve really crossed a line in the garden sand — cucumbers and lemons are berries? And, a tomato is, botanically speaking, a berry, too? Aren’t we going to have fun at the next dinner table confusing a bunch of kids!

In the meantime, I don’t know what you’re going to grab to eat, but personally I’m going out for a bag of chips. Last time I checked they were still in the “snacks” aisle, and I haven’t discovered one reason to categorize them otherwise.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who will no doubt continue the agreed reality of how we sort our fruits and veggies in the produce department and in our refrigerators’ crisper drawers.