What Is A Vegetable
The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This usually means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant.
However, the word is not scientific, and its meaning is largely based on culinary and cultural tradition. Therefore, the application of the word is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. For example, some people consider mushrooms to be vegetables, while others consider them a separate food category.
The list of food items called "vegetable" is quite long, and includes many different parts of plants:
A celery leaf
- Flower bud
- Seeds
- Sweet corn (maize), peas, beans
- kale, collard greens, spinach, arugula, beet greens, bok choy, chard, choi sum, turnip greens, endive, lettuce, mustard greens, watercress, garlic chives, gai lan
- Leaf sheaths
- Whole-plant sprouts
- soybean (moyashi), mung beans, urad, and alfalfa.
- Fruits in the botanical sense, but used as vegetables
- tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchinis, pumpkins, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, christophene, okra, breadfruit and avocado, and also the following:
