Message #93169

[Bianca]

                                      Surprising Truths About Fruits and Vegetables







Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor
LiveScience.com
Tue Jul 22, 2008
 
Tomatoes, japaleño peppers, serrano peppers and now avocadoes are all under scrutiny due to the recent Salmonella outbreak, making many Americans nervous about eating their vegetables.



 
Or make that, their fruits. Oh, drat. Which is it?



Actually, all four of these produce items are classified as fruits by scientists, regardless of what consumers, grocers and nutritionists think, said Amy Litt, director of Plant Genomics and Cullman
curator at The New York Botanical Garden.


"The thing that is funny from my point of view, and it's always a mystery to me, is that everyone knows that a tomato is a fruit, but they don't know that a squash or a string bean or a cuke [cucumber] is also a fruit," said Litt, who lately is studying the genes that make tomatoes fleshy. "I'm not sure how it got into the public realm of knowledge that a tomato is a fruit. But it's like, well, all these other things are a fruit too."

In reality, the public is fairly clueless on all of this. In a straw poll of 35 people in Manhattan yesterday, about half (18) said tomatoes were a fruit. All but one person said string beans were a vegetable and most (30) said squash is a vegetable.

Avocadoes, string beans, squash, eggplant, green pepper and okra are all technically fruits, Litt says. On the other hand, rhubarb is not a fruit. Let's not even start with strawberries just yet.








Totally lost?



OK, in the world of botany, a fruit is the structure that bears the seeds of a plant. It is formed in the plant's flower. In the center, the female parts of the flower include the ovary. The ovary has structures inside that become the seeds when fertilized. So the ovary will develop into the fruit.

To the plant, fruits are basically a means of spreading the seeds around, generally by wind or animal poop. In the latter case, fruits such as raspberries become thicker and accumulate sugars and bright colors, thereby attracting birds or other animals that eat and then "we say, they deposit the seeds in a package of fertilizer," Litt said. In other cases, the fruit dries out and opens and the winds carries the seeds to their next home to start the cycle over again.

A good example is cotton or a milkweed pod.