Here’s where it gets fun. Chefs and grandmas don’t care about plant biology. They care about flavor. If it’s sweet or tart, they call it a fruit. If it’s savory or bitter, they call it a vegetable. This is pure, delicious chaos.
That’s why a tomato is a fruit to a botanist but a vegetable to everyone making spaghetti. And a rhubarb is a vegetable (it’s a stalk) that we treat like a fruit because we drown it in sugar. It’s the ultimate identity fraud, and we are all accomplices.
Consider the avocado. It’s a single-seeded berry (a fruit!), yet we smush it onto toast with salt and pretend it’s a savory vegetable. If aliens landed and saw us eat guacamole, they’d think we were savages who worship egg-shaped tree nuts. We are.
