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submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago

To me arguing over which fruit belongs in which category is a prime example of people arguing over shadows in Plato's cave. Not that it's a waste of time or anything but sometimes people act like tomatoes won't grow if you call them vegetables. Like at the end of the day it's just humans developing a system to make sense of nature rather than discovering an inherent, pre-existing system.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Like at the end of the day it’s just humans developing a system to make sense of nature

The core of the matter is that we have multiple, mutually incompatible schemes sharing in part the same terminology. Biology is not cooking, both fields care about vastly different things thus the categorisation scheme is different, that's the end of it. Culinarily, tomatoes have too much umami to be fruit. Botanically peppermint is an aromatic, I recommend you not put any into your soffritto.


EDIT:

Tomato is also dominated by oxalic acid, not malic, citric, (typical fruit acids) or acetic (fermented/overripe). Oxalic acid is in parsley, chives, spinach, beans, lettuce, that kind of stuff. "It's sour" isn't sufficient to describe a taste profile, our tongues may not tell them apart but our noses definitely do.

I think it should be possible to break the culinary categorisation down to chemistry. That doesn't tell you anything about the "why" but it's definitely not random and definitely not all in our heads.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I think it should be possible to break the culinary categorisation down to chemistry. That doesn't tell you anything about the "why" but it's definitely not random and definitely not all in our heads.

I agree with what you mean in kind of a broad-strokes way, but as individuals our subjective experiences of flavors can vary pretty wildly. There's genetics, neurology, age, and habit/experience that influence our taste in terms of actually sensing the chemicals. Then there's what we see, taste, and smell just prior or during tasting that severely impact our interpretation of that chemical sense.

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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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