Tomato Bores

The most tiresome conversational gambit in the history of the entire world is, “Hey, did you know the tomato is really a fruit?”

No, it’s not. In ordinary English, a fruit is a part of a plant that we eat because it’s sweet or primarily used for making desserts. (Odd cases like the lemon and the pumpkin are classed with their nearest relatives.)

It’s true that botanists call a plant’s seed-bearing structure its fruit, and (as we all know) a tomato has seeds, but so what? In that sense, eggplants, chile peppers, squashes, cucumbers and olives are fruits too. In fact, in the special terminology of botany, nearly every vegetable that’s not more or less a root or a leaf is a fruit.

And if you’re going to be technical about it, the strawberry isn’t a fruit. It’s a sweet, fleshy something-or-other that holds fruits. For botanical reasons, those little crunchy seed-like things are considered the strawberry’s fruits.

But just wait; some day some clown is going to ask you, “Hey, did you know that buckwheat and quinoa aren’t grains?”

This will be why. In cookery, a grain is a starchy seed, but to a botanist, it has to be the seed of a grass. Wheat, rye, barley, oats, rice and even corn are members of the grass family (Graminaceae), but buckwheat belongs to a different family, the Polygonaceae--a pretty no-account family, too, mostly weeds. Probably the only relatives of buckwheat you’ve ever heard of are rhubarb and the decorative plant muehlenbeckia. And quinoa (of the family Chenopodiaceae) is related to beets and spinach.

So buckwheat and quinoa aren’t grains, are they?

Oh, get real. Sure they are.