What's The Most "Vegetable" Vegetable?

Botanically speaking, there is no such thing as a vegetable, so what exactly is sitting on your dinner plate? And if our culinary world is built on biological lies, which plant is actually the most vegetable like? Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens tackle a chaotic intersection of linguistics, plant taxonomy, and nutrition, dismantling the arbitrary categories we use to organise our food, revealing that our supermarket aisles are a scientifically lawless wasteland. It is a strangely profound look at how human language struggles to categorise the natural world, proving that the things we eat every day are far weirder than we think with biological definitions that turn cucumbers and eggplants into fruits, and the nutritional benchmarks we use to invent the concept of a "vegetable" from scratch. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli OakleyVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellResearcher: Hannah Dodd-VastiauAssistant Producer: Imee MarriottSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Michael Stevens?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:02Hannah Fry?

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:04Michael Stevens?

  And today, we're going to talk about vegetables. In fact, what I want you out there, the listener, to do is, if you can, if you can, comment below what you believe is the most vegetable vegetable.

• 0:20Hannah Fry?

  And we're not necessarily talking here about the first vegetable that comes to mind. We want you to go deep on this. We want you to, we want you to get to the soul of what it means to be a vegetable. What vegetable best personifies, best resembles that wider class?

• 0:38Michael Stevens?

  That's right. That's right. Pretend you're on Family Feud and you're asked to name a vegetable, and you get the most points if the most other people named the same one. All right? We're talking the most famous, prototypical, obvious vegetable. As it turns out, the answer is both more difficult and more revealing than you might think.

• 1:05Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 1:08Hannah Fry?

  The word cancer comes from the Greek kakinos, meaning crab. And Hippocrates used that word because tumors can spread out like crabs' legs.

• 1:17Michael Stevens?

  For a long time, cancer was poorly understood. And so I think because of that, it was almost scarier and people didn't even say its name. But what science has done since is replace uncertainty with understanding.

• 1:30Hannah Fry?

  But that understanding is an instant because cancer isn't just one disease. It's hundreds of different diseases, each behaving differently, depending on where it is and its genes. And that complexity is why progress in cancer research can feel like it's slow. But step by step, research is saving and improving lives.

• 1:50Michael Stevens?

  And that's why Cancer Research UK, the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, supports work across more than 200 types of cancer, from the tiny changes inside cells that start the disease to better ways to spot it earlier and treat it more precisely.

• 2:06Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

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• 4:23Hannah Fry?

  Okay, first off, I wanna know what your vegetable was, Michael. What did you go for?

• 4:27Michael Stevens?

  Okay, mine is broccoli.

• 4:29Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 4:30Michael Stevens?

  I think-

• 4:30Hannah Fry?

  Clean, classic lines.

• 4:31Michael Stevens?

  It's classic. I think, okay, you're gonna draw a cartoon of a kid having to eat vegetables, you put broccoli on the plate, you know? Eh, wha- what was yours?

• 4:41Hannah Fry?

  I think broccoli is revealing, which I think, I think we'll come to that one later because I've got some things to say about broccoli. I'm not going broccoli. Broccoli, broccoli can be absolutely delicious. A bit of tender stem broccoli with garlic, amazing, right? A bit of soy sauce, fantastic. I think that vegetables need to be a moral obligation, not a treat, right?

• 5:00Michael Stevens?

  Interesting.

• 5:01Hannah Fry?

  So I'm going, I'm going overcooked sprouts. That's, uh, that's where I'm going.

• 5:05Michael Stevens?

  Whoa. Brussels sprouts?

• 5:07Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, why not?

• 5:08Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 5:09Hannah Fry?

  Why not?

• 5:09Michael Stevens?

  It's not just sprouts, though, is it? It's overcooked.

• 5:13Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I think you need to-

• 5:15Michael Stevens?

  It's not even a natural version. It's a, it's a version that humans have interfered in improperly, and that is what becomes a vegetable.

• 5:22Hannah Fry?

  I mean, I think in truth, humans have interfered in all vegetables. Carrots used to be purple. Um, I think broccoli and sprouts used to be the same, same plant at one point. I mean, look, I'm either going sprout, or I would, I would stretch, I would stretch to an uncooked turnip or potato. You know, something that, that asks for nothing, that hides in the ground, that sustains armies and industrial revolutions. Also, I've got Irish genes in me. I sort of need to go a bit the potato.

• 5:50Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so, so, overcooked sprouts or an uncooked potato? I love this because what we're talking about today, if you haven't already noticed, is categories. And the way words change the way we understand, experiment with, and make sense of reality. So, I've just even, I didn't even think about this before the episode, but human interference, the amount of interference we've had in the item, I think could change whether it's a vegetable or less so. Like, if you cook Brussels sprouts with a whole bunch of pine nuts and bacon bits, is it less of a vegetable?

• 6:29Hannah Fry?

  Well, it's more of a treat, definitely.

• 6:32Michael Stevens?

  And you put your finger, Hannah, on, I think, some important things. I'm thinking, what would survey results say? But you're like, what is the essence of a vegetable? It's a moral obligation, not fun, plain.

• 6:46Hannah Fry?

  Not trying hard, not fancy, really, really basic, really salt of the earth, as it were. You know, I want to, I like it being buried underground, you know, living in mud. That's, I think there's something about that.

• 7:01Michael Stevens?

  That's of, that makes it the vegetable-iest. Well, I wanna, I wanna start with this frame, okay? I wanna, I want us to try to answer this question, and there's like different ways to do it. But let's start botanically, like really, really scientifically. I should mention, by the way, that this question didn't come up between Hannah and I by itself. It came from the crew that works at the grocery store I go to. We were all chatting and they were like, dude, dude, dude, dude. We were talking the other day on break, like, what's the most vegetable vegetable? And these guys work at a grocery store. They know produce, they know vegetables, and they couldn't agree on it. And I'm like, ah, that's ridiculous, and it's so ridiculous, we're gonna do a whole podcast on it. The first avenue, I thought, was let's be scientific about this.

• 7:46Michael Stevens?

  What is the definition of a vegetable? Botanists would say, never heard of it. They just don't use that word, okay? To them, vegetable is vegetation. It's plant life. Like, literally, fruits are a kind of vegetable to a botanist, because vegetable just means plant matter. If you want to be really specific, they might allow vegetable to mean plant matter that is edible, as opposed to inedible.

• 8:13Hannah Fry?

  I mean, they have thought about this a lot, the botanists. I mean, in fact, there was this entire explosion of trying to categorize nature that started really with Carl Linnaeus in the 1700s. This is a guy, by the way, who had this, he, you know, before it, all of, all of biological life was this absolute mess. You know, you get one description in one country, which would be 15 Latin words. You get another description in another country. It was just, I mean, it was all over the place. There weren't categories anywhere. And he came in, sorted out the system. He's the reason, really, why we have the, the genus species. So Homo sapiens or gorilla gorilla, I think is the other one. This is one of my favorites. I have to tell you, when I um, when I joined Queen's College at Cambridge, this, this place has been going since the fourteen hundreds.

• 8:59Hannah Fry?

  You still have to swear all of the oaths in Latin in front of all of the other fellows. So I had to learn, oh my gosh, I had to learn this long passage in Latin. And uh, it was genuinely one of the most horrifying public speaking moments in my entire life, trying to speak a dead language. I mean, it's not like you can sort of look up the pronunciation, ask a native speaker.

• 9:18Michael Stevens?

  Ask a native ancient Latin speaker, but you must have felt so important, like the moment must have been filled with such gravity. You're speaking Latin.

• 9:28Hannah Fry?

  In this room that was literally, you know, around, built in the fourteen hundreds. Um, I mean, yes, it was also frankly absurd and ridiculous and I felt very bad that I was wearing trainers, so um, that was my overriding feeling. Okay, here's the thing, so, so Linnaeus, he cared a lot about uh, botany, about the botanical categories, but he was completely, um, his, his focus was totally on the sexual reproductive organs of plants, okay? It was basically botanical smut, that was, that was his whole focus.

• 9:58Michael Stevens?

  This guy was randy for plants.

• 10:01Hannah Fry?

  He was randy for plant, exactly, he was a plant perv. And also he wrote about them in quite plant pervy ways, so for example, if a plant, uh, there's a polyandria that he would write about and he would say, it's where you get twenty males or more in the same bed with the female, the scandal.

• 10:19Michael Stevens?

  He's using bed, right.

• 10:21Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. Or if you get plants that don't have obvious flowers, like ferns, fungi, that kind of thing, he described them as having clandestine marriages, which is also, I think, amazing. I think that this is what gives us the actual definition of what a fruit is, because it all comes down to the, the sexual reproduction of plants, right?

• 10:40Michael Stevens?

  It, it does, it does, and, and it's so important to, to, to hear stories like that because it shows that the way we cut up the world we found ourselves in is very much, it's covered in our fingerprints, that we look at flowers and we go, ah, yes, you're flirting with each other, you're attracting mates, you're, you're explicitly sexual. And a fruit, scientifically, botanically, a fruit is a ripened ovary.

• 11:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Michael Stevens?

  Some humans have ovaries, but they don't ripen into a baby. The, the, the, the ovary is what contains the ovum's, the eggs. And in a plant that has flowers, you've got an ovary, usually down in the middle of the plant. And when it gets fertilized, the entire ovary turns into a fruit.

• 11:33Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:34Michael Stevens?

  Sometimes a flower will have lots of ovaries in it and they'll all become a fruit, an individual fruit, but they'll all be stuck together and that's an aggregate fruit, like a strawberry. There's a lot, we don't have to get into all the different kinds of fruit, the difference between like a berry and a compound fruit or a droop. But we could all pretty much agree that if it's a fruit, it's not a vegetable.

• 11:57Hannah Fry?

  But it's also, I think it's also worth saying that it's only after fertilization. I mean, fruits are, you're basically, you're eating the aftermath of plant sex. That's, that's what you're doing, essentially.

• 12:07Michael Stevens?

  Yes, yes. The more I was reading about sexual reproduction in plants, the more I was like, wow, eating a banana just got even more inappropriate.

• 12:20Hannah Fry?

  It's so wildly inappropriate. I mean, here's the thing, so, so vegetables then are the edible parts of plants that are asexual, so not to do with the reproductive system. You know, carrots are root, celery are the stems, you've got sort of, it's a sort of vegetative tissue because it doesn't have anything to do with plant reproduction. At the same time, broccoli, okay, so if you leave broccoli in the ground, it will erupt into a bouquet of yellow flowers unfertilized. So what you are eating when you're eating broccoli is unbloomed sexual organs. That's, uh, that's equally icky.

• 12:56Michael Stevens?

  Oh my gosh. Okay, but this, I love this. I love your definition of a vegetable as a non-sexual part of a plant.

• 13:06Hannah Fry?

  That is edible.

• 13:07Michael Stevens?

  That is edible. Yeah, I'm actually writing this down because I just, I want to never forget this, that is edible. And so there are some fruits that, um, the ovary ripens, but then other parts of the plant get incorporated into the chunk. Okay, I, I, I, I love this definition because I think that there are some non-sexual parts of the plant that become sexual in ripening.

• 13:35Michael Stevens?

  So some fruits like a pear or a pineapple are called accessory fruits. And they are not just the ovary, but other parts of the plant, other tissues become incorporated into the chunk. So like a pineapple, an apple. So not everything about the apple is sexual. Some parts of it are other parts of the plant, other parts of the carpal or whatever else was there around the ovary, it like joins in. So I think if we want to answer, what is the most vegetable-iest thing? We've got to find something that's just never sexualized

• 14:17Michael Stevens?

  by the plant. And so I present one oddball answer that's pretty defensible.

• 14:23Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 14:24Michael Stevens?

  The most vegetable vegetable is cinnamon. Okay. Cause it comes from the bark of a tree.

• 14:31Hannah Fry?

  There's nothing sexy about the bark of a tree.

• 14:34Michael Stevens?

  There's nothing sexy. It's barely alive. It's not playing a role in the reproduction of the tree, but it's edible.

• 14:41Hannah Fry?

  Hang on, is it really edible though? Or, because you don't actually sort of chew on it, do you? It's just the flavor of it. Are you really, are you really eating it?

• 14:51Michael Stevens?

  It goes into your body. Do you digest it? Or does it just kind of like come out? Is it just a flavoring? I don't know. But it's definitely eatable. It can be put in your body and you're okay and it passes through.

• 15:04Hannah Fry?

  Okay. So this is, this is interesting, right? So the most vegetable vegetable, where we're using the definition of the least sexy part is, is cinnamon. Okay. I mean, we'll see how people react to that in the comments, Michael. But I suspect not well.

• 15:18Michael Stevens?

  I don't know enough about plants to really judge the least sexy plant part. But in the comments below, tell me who wins the award for least sexy plant part. Now, whether that means that it wins the big grand prize for being the most vegetable-iest is still a matter of debate and maybe we'll resolve it in this episode.

• 15:38Hannah Fry?

  Can I just quickly do a side note? Just because we're talking about accessory fruits and fruits that, that you eat more than just. The ovary of the plant. You know, uh, do you know how figs get fertilized?

• 15:50Michael Stevens?

  Well, it's with wasps, right?

• 15:51Hannah Fry?

  Right. So what happens is there's a very particular breed of wasp which has to to fertilize. And she climbs into the the fig, into the base of the fig. And uh, it's such a tight hole. That's where she goes and gives birth to her larvae, which then wriggle out of the plant and and go off elsewhere. So it's basically a pregnant wasp climbs into the fig. But the act of climbing in is so, it's so small, it rips her wings off. And so over time, the the plant, the fig, has developed this, I think it's an acid that dissolves her body and absorbs it into the fruit of a fig. So when you eat a fig, you are also eating not just a a plant ovary, but a dissolved pregnant wasp.

• 16:35Michael Stevens?

  Luckily, it's dissolved. The wing has been reincorporated into delicious figginess, but yeah.

• 16:43Hannah Fry?

  I mean, the whole body, not just the wing, the whole body of the wasp.

• 16:46Michael Stevens?

  So is a, is a fig kind of a carnivore food? Is it less vegan because it's an animal has lost some parts?

• 16:56Hannah Fry?

  That is a great question. Are figs vegan?

• 17:00Michael Stevens?

  Well, to be fair though, the wasp knows it's going to happen and is okay with it. We aren't taking the wings from the wasp in order to make a fig.

• 17:11Hannah Fry?

  I think, I think we're gonna get into definitions again quite quickly when we start talking about what a wasp does and doesn't know.

• 17:16Michael Stevens?

  Uh, right, yeah. Our animal consciousness and uh, uh, intentions episode will come later, but um, ultimately, besides figs, what I love about fruit is that they are like one of the most ethical things to eat because the plant, in in many cases, wants its fruit to be eaten. That's how it reproduces. It needs the seeds to go through your digestive system, come out in a nice little nutrient pile of manure and grow. So if you really wanted to be as ethical of a consumer of food as possible, you would need to eat fruits whose dispersal method includes being eaten, and you would need to then defecate

• 18:01Michael Stevens?

  outside, not into a toilet where the seed has no hope. Other than that, you are ending some part of or a whole living thing, even if it's, you know, cinnamon. No, no cinnamon. Oh, I shouldn't say cinnamon because you can take the bark off and I think the tree survives.

• 18:18Hannah Fry?

  You can. So hang on. We're now saying cinnamon is not only the most vegetable vegetable and the most unsexy part of a plant, but also the most ethical food to consume.

• 18:27Michael Stevens?

  I don't know if it is, though. I don't know if the tree likes its bark being pulled off.

• 18:31Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, fair.

• 18:32Michael Stevens?

  I think apple trees love their apples to be eaten. That's why they make them. They evolved it for consumption. But if I pluck a potato out of the ground, I'm like, your roots are mine. Same with carrots, which I think carrots are also a really culturally prototypical vegetable. So, so we're not here to give out Nobel Peace Prizes for vegetable consumption, but what we are looking for is what's the most vegetable vegetable. And I think that if there's anything fruity about it, it loses points. So if it is a ripened ovary or is, uh, part of it is a ripened ovary, it is not as vegetable-y to me.

• 19:16Michael Stevens?

  That means that pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, beans and peas are all fruits botanically.

• 19:27Hannah Fry?

  I mean, tomato is the one that people talk about. That's the sort of one that's, uh, that's famous, but I didn't realize all of those.

• 19:34Michael Stevens?

  Those are all fruits botanically because they are ripened ovaries. Here's the one that blew my mind. Rice is a fruit. Grains of rice are just ripened ovaries from a rice plant.

• 19:48Hannah Fry?

  But hold on a second. So if you, if you allowed rice to run its natural course without intervening and harvesting it. Would grains of rice, no, they don't, they don't have seeds in them, do they?

• 20:01Michael Stevens?

  No, they're processed away. The seeds are there in the beginning, but then we just get the, the endosperm part, the food that was supposed to be for the seed to grow from. Instead, we grow from it. Take that, rice. So rice, not very vegetabley to me because it's too, it's too much of a fruit. It's, it's a ripened ovary, or at least it's, I mean, that the endosperm comes from the ovary. Uh, there's this whole, we could talk about plants forever. They're double fertilized. When pollen hits the plant, it not only creates an embryo, it also creates endosperm, which is, in my mind at least, it's kind of like the, um, the placenta of the plant. It's like, here's, here's the nutrition that you're going to need as you grow, little zygote embryo thing. And we eat that part, but I

• 20:46Michael Stevens?

  don't think we eat the rice seed. Or it's like, you know, when you take a peanut and you, and you break a little peanut in half and you can see that there's like a plant looking thing in there with like little roots. That's the actual embryo. But then the rest of it is just baby formula for that baby peanut plant to grow from.

• 21:05Hannah Fry?

  You know what? I actually think, while we get into it, I think Linnaeus had a, had, uh, he was on the right track of being a bit of a plant perv. Plants are quite interesting, aren't they?

• 21:13Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, I mean, look, they exist today because of their reproductive abilities, and it's really one that's important to them. But if we cut all of that out and we say that a vegetable has to be not sexy, we're stuck with other parts of the plants that don't play a role in reproduction, like their roots. Okay. So carrots and beets, bulbs, like onions, um, stems. Okay. Celery seems very vegetabley as we dive into this. Leaves, that's great. Lettuce or flower buds, like broccoli. But there's something unsatisfying about just using botanical scientific definitions to answer this question.

• 21:52Hannah Fry?

  Right. Because the thing is, is that while scientists might not agree on what a vegetable is, I think all of us can agree. And I think all of us would agree that courgettes definitely fit into that category. And so what we want to talk about in the second half is about how this interpretation of what this category actually is differs from region to region, from culture to culture, and also how it's sometimes been legally tested too. We'll come to that after the break.

• 22:25Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Project Hail Mary, the new spectacular space adventure movie coming to cinemas from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir, and the directors of the Spider-Verse movies, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. But here's an even better combination: Teachers in Space.

• 22:42Hannah Fry?

  Hello, thank you. Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as science teacher Ryland Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission into space to discover why the sun and the stars are dying. And he teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. What kind of prep would you hope Ryan Gosling had done for this role in order to play the role of a science teacher?

• 23:09Michael Stevens?

  He should have spent a bunch of time with cool teenagers and tried to teach things to them, so that it wasn't just like a good explanation, but also kept their interest and made them want to hear more and understand it so that they could share it to be cool too.

• 23:27Hannah Fry?

  See Project Hail Mary in cinemas and IMAX from Thursday, the 19th of March.

• 23:31Michael Stevens?

  You can also catch it early on Saturday, the 14th of March, which is Pi Day, and Sunday, the 15th of March.

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• 24:42Hannah Fry?

  And we're back. Now, we mentioned in the first half, the tomato. This is sort of, I think this is the one that gets thrown around. The tomato is actually a fruit, not a vegetable, botanically at least. This has actually been tested in court. So in the 1800s, just stop me if this story sounds familiar, but there was this really interesting thing going on about tariffs that were being imposed internationally into and out of American exports and imports. And the newly created Tariff Act, there was an import duty on foreign vegetables, but fruit was excluded. And there was this importer who was trying to bring in this ton of West Indian tomatoes to New York. He saw that he had a 10% tax and was like, well, hang on a second.

• 25:25Hannah Fry?

  This is nonsense. Tomatoes are very clearly a fruit. They're very clearly an ovary. There is very clearly seeds involved. Why are you charging me vegetable tax on what is demonstrably fruit? So he took it to court, basically. They ended up at Supreme Court, no less, for this, for this ruling. And in the end, the court took the side of a customs collector who said, look, I don't, I don't care about your botanical stuff. I care about common parlance. And in that sense, tomatoes are vegetables. And, and the winning argument that turned it was that tomatoes are usually served at dinner

• 26:06Hannah Fry?

  with or after the soup, fish or meats, and not at dessert, which is when you would expect, when you would expect fruits to appear. So we had to pay up. So, so legally, legally, botanically, tomatoes might be fruits, but legally, they are vegetables.

• 26:22Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, that's, that's a pretty convincing reason to call the tomato a vegetable. You know, if we've thought about it really hard and courts have decided that what we feel matters more than the evolution and botanical structures of the fruit.

• 26:42Michael Stevens?

  Or rather vegetable, then you know, maybe we need to consider culture more than science. This reminds me of the 2006 lawsuit that was brought by Panera Bread against a restaurant called Qdoba. This happened in Indiana and the details, I don't know everything about, but it's probably a great Wikipedia article to read. Basically, a Panera Bread, which is a restaurant that serves sandwiches, moved into a mall and part of their contract was that that mall, the owner of the mall, was never going to have another sandwich place move in. And they thought, it's great, we won't have competition. But then the owner allowed a Qdoba to open a location in the mall. Qdoba sells burritos.

• 27:25Michael Stevens?

  Now, to a person, a sandwich, a burrito, they're good, they compete with each other for what you want to have for lunch. And Panera noticed this and said, hey, we're going to lose customers to Qdoba. But you said you weren't going to have a sandwich shop in the mall. So they brought the owner to court and the courts decided, hmm, no, a burrito is not a sandwich. So the Qdoba can stay. Yeah.

• 27:51Hannah Fry?

  Okay. It's so interesting that it ultimately comes down to money before you can make this distinction. There was one, we had similar one in the UK with Jaffa cakes. I don't know, I don't know whether, have you, have you ever tried a Jaffa cake?

• 28:03Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like a, a cakey thing filled with like, orange goop.

• 28:08Hannah Fry?

  Interestingly, you said cakey thing because you find it in the biscuit aisle or cookie aisle, I should say.

• 28:13Michael Stevens?

  But it's not crunchy.

• 28:15Hannah Fry?

  It's not crunchy, which actually was the ultimate argument that won it, their court case. So this is, um, this is in the nineties. I mean, it's the same story over and over again, essentially. There was a tax to pay, in this case VAT, that you had to pay on biscuits, but you didn't have to pay on cakes. And even though Jaffa cakes is in the name, they come in a biscuit box, they're the size of biscuits, there's sort of orange jelly inside, exactly as you described. And during the trial, McVitties, who make them, who make Jaffa cakes, to prove that it was a cake, they made a sort of giant diversion of, of a Jaffa cake to sort of demonstrate that it was spongy. And the, the winning argument, exactly as you described, came down to this idea that cakes go stale

• 28:59Hannah Fry?

  over time, whereas biscuits go soft. And if you leave a Jaffa cake out, it goes stale, goes hard, not soft.

• 29:07Michael Stevens?

  Right, it dries out. Wow. See, I love this kind of stuff. Like, I just love this, like, we're gonna come up with a way to decide what is a cake and what is a cookie legally.

• 29:18Hannah Fry?

  But it does come down to the point you made earlier, though, about public opinion, that how we feel about it is the thing that matters. There was, um, people have actually done this. They've gone out and asked people, what do you think tomatoes are? Do you see them as fruit? Do you see them as vegetables? They discovered that there's just substantial disagreement between people on all kinds of things, by the way, not just, not just tomatoes, but rice, beans, ketchup, um, grape jelly, whether it's fruits, vegetables, or something else. Fifty-one percent of people, this is in the US, by the way, classified tomatoes as vegetables, which I think is fair enough. I'd probably put it in that category as well.

• 29:57Michael Stevens?

  Only fifty-one percent, though. We are really split. You know what? That makes me think that forty-nine percent of the US is just a bunch of little Peabody, like, excuse me, but the tomato is a fruit. I know that. It's not used in culinary practices like you would use a fruit. You don't cut some up and put it on ice cream. The fact that so many, that only fifty-one percent of Americans say a tomato is a vegetable, seems like it's based on that and not so much on, well, no, everyone knows it's a fruit.

• 30:25Hannah Fry?

  Well, twenty-one percent thought that rice was a vegetable, so more for them. We now know it's endosperm. I don't know. Doesn't say here what percentage of people correctly answered it as that.

• 30:35Michael Stevens?

  You know what? I, I would say that it's like a carb. Like, I would put rice in the category with potatoes and bread.

• 30:42Hannah Fry?

  Hmm, just a straight up carb.

• 30:44Michael Stevens?

  I would, I would probably not call it a vegetable. And today I learned that it's actually a fruit scientifically, but it's a weird, beans, rice, they're weird edge cases where you're like, wait a second. I mean, a bean feels like a vegetable to me, but it's a fruit.

• 31:01Hannah Fry?

  Or it's just baby formula, baby formula for baby rice, you know?

• 31:05Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's. Baby food, it's baby food, it's plant baby food.

• 31:10Hannah Fry?

  It's baby food. I tell you this, though, this does tell you something about America. Ketchup was labeled as a vegetable by twenty six percent of respondents. But I do quite like the idea that forty, forty seven percent of people are saying, yeah, it's fruit. I know the, I know the true and correct definition.

• 31:27Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 31:28Hannah Fry?

  And yet twenty six percent of people are saying that ketchup is a vegetable.

• 31:33Michael Stevens?

  Right, so you add sugar and salt and vinegar to tomatoes. And the number of people who say it's a vegetable does drop.

• 31:41Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Michael Stevens?

  In half.

• 31:43Hannah Fry?

  Yes, it does.

• 31:45Michael Stevens?

  What do they start saying it is? Do they start saying that, well, now it's a fruit? Or do they say it's neither?

• 31:50Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so ketchup, twenty six point three percent of people said that they thought ketchup was a vegetable. Ten percent of people thought that ketchup was a fruit. Fifty six percent said something else.

• 32:01Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 32:02Hannah Fry?

  And seven percent said, I'm not, I'm, I don't know.

• 32:05Michael Stevens?

  Now, I think a lot of listeners might be like, oh, my gosh, only Americans would think ketchup is a vegetable. But I think that it is, like linguistically and botanically, a difficult question. I think when people get upset about results like that, they're upset because they're conflating the word vegetable with healthful. And they're thinking ketchup is not healthy, it's full of sugar and salt, and so you shouldn't call it a vegetable. Only healthy foods that are not fun to eat should be called vegetables. And again, that's part of cultural definitions.

• 32:40Hannah Fry?

  I also think, if we've been completely fair to people, if the distinction is, does it come from a plant? I mean, ketchup broadly does. Is it served with dessert or main course? And it's your main meal, it's the same argument that the Supreme Court used. I mean, I don't, I don't think it's that absurd. I think the other thing that's worth adding is that there was one point when the Reagan administration tried to get ketchup listed as a vegetable in order to save money on the amount of fruit and vegetables that were, uh, were given to schoolchildren every day.

• 33:12Michael Stevens?

  Ah, yeah.

• 33:13Hannah Fry?

  So actually, I think that there is, maybe I was being a tiny bit unfair in the way that I originally presented it. I take back everything I said about Americans.

• 33:20Michael Stevens?

  Well, look, it's a difficult question. Like, I did a very non-scientific review of what people have said when asked to name a vegetable. First thing that comes to their mind. And I looked through Family Feud answers, which kind of, they're never, I've never found one that was just name a vegetable. It's usually, "Name a vegetable you grow in your garden," which tomato one, number one answer. "Name a vegetable that kids don't like to eat." "Name a vegetable that's not green." But I also looked at Reddit threads, because this question, "What is the most vegetable vegetable?", has been asked on Reddit before. The oldest one was three years ago. And hands down, broccoli is the number one answer people give.

• 34:01Hannah Fry?

  I just don't agree.

• 34:03Michael Stevens?

  Number two is carrot. And I'm now thinking I'm going to change my original answer from the beginning of the show to carrot, because the broccoli is too flowery. It's got florets on it, it's too sexy. The carrot, it's just a root part. It doesn't play a big role in reproduction, and so it, to me, is more vegetable for that reason.

• 34:25Hannah Fry?

  There's nothing sexy about a carrot, Michael Stevens 2026. That's it.

• 34:30Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no. Now all the carrot fans are going to be like, "Don't shame my love of carrots." Look.

• 34:38Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 34:39Michael Stevens?

  I wanted to throw in yet another frame we could use to determine vegetableness. And that is to look at what the word vegetable means. The word vegetable today can also mean slow, not moving. Someone who's unconscious could be described as being in a vegetative state. So then I looked into, "What's the slowest growing plant?" Because it, it's flesh, it's roots, they're vegetables, but because they grow so slowly, they're also very vegetable. They don't move. The slowest growing plant that I could find is the creosote bush. This thing grows in really harsh, dry environments.

• 35:24Michael Stevens?

  And you should look up David Adam Burrow's Green Planet clip about this plant, because he visited a plant in the 80s and did a whole segment about them. And then he came back, like, 40 years later, and the plant is the same.

• 35:42Michael Stevens?

  And they put the two clips together. It's like him, like young David Attenborough, like he's this young strapping man next to a plant and then they like dissolve and it's old Attenborough next to the same plant. And in those 40 years, it grew less than an inch. In fact, the creosote bush is mainly inactive. It's mainly not growing. It's like not dead, but it only comes to life if it rains, which is, you know, pretty much never. So these things are so slow. I think that if you ate the leaves of a creosote bush, you are eating the most vegetable vegetable. If by the first vegetable, we mean slow.

• 36:27Hannah Fry?

  Okay, but can you, can you eat the leaves of that bush?

• 36:32Michael Stevens?

  You can put them in your mouth and chew them and swallow them. I don't know what it would do to you. Let's look it up. Creosote bush edible? Question mark. Hey, you can make tea.

• 36:46Hannah Fry?

  That's not eating. That doesn't count. I'm sorry.

• 36:49Michael Stevens?

  Apparently the tea is so bitter, its consumption is not very popular.

• 36:56Hannah Fry?

  So far, you've got, so far, you've got this and cinnamon. I mean, forgive me if I pass up on an opportunity to come around for dinner at your house.

• 37:05Michael Stevens?

  Flower petals. Creosote flower petals are okay to use in a salad. And I love that it's the petal because the petal is not part of what winds up becoming a fruit or anything.

• 37:16Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. It's adjacent to the sexual parts, though. Hmm.

• 37:20Michael Stevens?

  Apparently creosote bush in large quantities is poisonous to livestock. So maybe edibleness is gonna fail it.

• 37:29Hannah Fry?

  Should also add, actually, that the leaves of the creosote bush of mammals, only the jackrabbit will eat them, and then only when it can find no other food, as the leaves are so bitter and horrible. Does iguanas do eat it, though?

• 37:43Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 37:44Hannah Fry?

  So, you know.

• 37:45Michael Stevens?

  I do, I do, however, feel like we should focus on what's edible to a human. In which case, let me move on to a slightly faster growing plant that's still amazingly slow, the saguaro cactus. This thing, okay, when it starts growing, I couldn't believe this. After its first two years of life, it's only about six and a half millimeters tall, like a quarter inch tall. You see in like the the wily coyote cartoons, these cactuses with the arms. So guaro cactuses don't really usually grow arms until they're at least a hundred years old. They grow at such a slow rate and they flower only once they're 35 years old.

• 38:27Michael Stevens?

  And you can eat saguaro cactus. Okay, there's a Southwest foraging Facebook group where they say that the fruit is great. You can make syrup out of saguaro fruit, but the flesh is not edible. It has minimal uses other than drying it out and breaking it up for mulch. Shoot, okay, so I'm not finding good slow vegetables.

• 38:48Hannah Fry?

  You're not doing good here. Well, hold on, olive trees last, you know, many thousands of years if they're lucky enough. There's one in Crete, which I think is 4,000 years old, the reports of it. I got to go meet it, it was incredible. Extremely slow growing. They have a tradition in Crete that when you are born, your family will plant an olive tree in your honor. And by the time you get to adulthood, it's basically like a stick still, even when you get to adulthood. And they don't really start looking like proper olive trees until they're 1,000 years old.

• 39:26Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow. Okay, so but obviously olives, olives are too fruity.

• 39:31Hannah Fry?

  Too fruity. And olive oil, too fruity.

• 39:35Michael Stevens?

  They are a seed, they come from an ovary, but the leaves, the leaves of the olive plant, of the olive tree can be eaten. So that's feeling to me very vegetabley and slow. So it's it's a vegetable botanically, it's also a vegetable in in the meaning of being really slow growing.

• 39:55Hannah Fry?

  My question is, how many people, when you initially asked the question, how many people wrote olive leaves?

• 40:00Michael Stevens?

  Uh, I'm gonna guess none.

• 40:03Hannah Fry?

  I'm gonna guess none too. I think stepping aside from the vegetable thing for a moment, there is this bigger question around this, which is the way that we choose to categorize things. And I think the way that the categories that we agree on end up changing our experience of reality. There's a few different examples of this that I could go into, but, but I think one of my favorites is about colors. So every language has different words for color. In English, there's, there's 11 words. Some languages only have two or three, you know, two, three or four color words. And what is interesting is that the color words that come first are always black and white, followed by red, right?

• 40:48Hannah Fry?

  Now, this is the reason why in Homer, they talk about the, the sea being wine red. And it's because they didn't yet have a, a, a word for blue. They hadn't yet categorized the world around them with language sufficiently that they recognized that blue was distinct from red, say. The thing is, is that in English, I know we're recording this in English, but there are other languages that have more colors than we do. In Russian, for example, they have a word for light blue and a word for dark blue. So I think that the, the word for light blue is gulaboy. And it's distinct. I mean, we don't, it's sort of like pink, effectively like pink, but for blue. Now, the thing is, you could just say, oh, this is very interesting.

• 41:33Hannah Fry?

  They've just got different words, different, different categories essentially. But actually, there is some evidence that it changes the way that people actually experience color when they have a richer set of categories in order to distinguish between them.

• 41:50Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Hannah Fry?

  One particularly famous experiment in the sixties was where they arranged colors in a triangle. And uh they got English speakers, they got Russian speakers, they got people from around the world to try and match the shade at the top with the one that it was closest to in the bottom. And it turned out that Russian speakers were faster when those shades at the top matched with their their language boundaries, when one was light and one was dark, while the English speakers basically showed no difference. It's blue, it's blue, it's blue. It doesn't matter. There's there's no there's no difference. But I think what's interesting about this, it's not saying are Russian speakers better than English speakers at matching shades of blue.

• 42:34Hannah Fry?

  Instead, it's it's it's suggesting that having separate words actually helps people distinguish things more quickly. Um but the language categories can actually influence how we perceive differences in the world and our processing speed.

• 42:48Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Yeah, I mean, I I definitely think our relationship to the tomato has been affected, at least in some small part, by the debate over what word we should use. And when you have words for things, you've put a handle on an otherwise kind of chaotic part of reality, and now you can manipulate it and you can think about it and you can control it in ways that you couldn't otherwise. I I think about this mathematically all the time. Here's a here's an exercise. What's three hundred times twenty?

• 43:19Hannah Fry?

  Six thousand?

• 43:21Michael Stevens?

  Six thousand, right? Like, it's not that difficult. It doesn't even look difficult. But if I asked you, what is one thousand two hundred and twenty times thirty two?

• 43:30Hannah Fry?

  I would have a mild panic.

• 43:31Michael Stevens?

  You'd say, oh, jeez, all right, let me get some paper out or let me think about it. It would take longer. However, that is the exact same math problem as three hundred times twenty. I just converted to base six. The way we choose what base our numeral system is in affects what kinds of problems are easy and which kind of problems are hard for us, just because of the words.

• 43:52Hannah Fry?

  And just to just to really clarify that, I mean, we use a base ten counting system largely because we have ten fingers. It makes it extremely easy. So our digits go from To nine and then we're like, what? Run out of digits. We'll just put a one there and go to the next one. And so on and so on. But there are ways, if you think about a clock, you you don't move on to the next half day until you have completed a round of twelve rather than ten. And there is no real reason apart from our fingers why we should be living in base ten. We could, we could easily have another squiggle for the number ten. Another squiggle for the number eleven and then one zero could actually denote twelve. And then all of a sudden, exactly as you describe, some maths problems would be way, way harder, but other ones would be easier.

• 44:35Michael Stevens?

  Okay, that was cool. I think that was so much better than the three hour long discussion of bases we did last time.

• 44:45Hannah Fry?

  Well, I don't know. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I agree.

• 44:49Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:49Hannah Fry?

  But this is, but this is coming down to the same idea. It's that you have this world that you exist in. And in order to make sense of it, in order to make it legible, it's necessary to cut it up and categorize it in a way that you can grab hold of. And the categories that you choose, the the way that you distinguish between things. Ends up changing, not just your experience of it, but also what you can go on to do with it. I mean, why can't we have tomatoes with dessert?

• 45:20Michael Stevens?

  Well, exactly. I mean, I've had chocolate with my main course. I've had chocolate with chicken. Because of course, the cacao bean is not sweet right off the plant. We add the sugar. You can take the. Um, the cocoa powder and make beautiful savory sauces out of it.

• 45:35Hannah Fry?

  Is that bean an ovary?

• 45:37Michael Stevens?

  I'm eating an ovary, aren't I?

• 45:38Hannah Fry?

  You're having fruit for for main course, my friend.

• 45:41Michael Stevens?

  Golly.

• 45:42Hannah Fry?

  You're all, you're all over the place.

• 45:45Michael Stevens?

  I'm all over the place. I'm just like, hey, if it has to do with plant sex, put it in my mouth.

• 45:52Hannah Fry?

  Michael Stevens, 2026. Okay then, so what can we agree on then? We agree that vegetable is not a botanical construct. It's not even really a cultural one. It's maybe a linguistic shorthand, but one that doesn't have hard boundaries.

• 46:08Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that the most vegetable vegetable is the platonic ideal that exists in our minds. It's made up by people. This reminds me of when I interviewed Jack Horner, the paleontologist who informed the Jurassic Park movies. And I thought, oh, I'm going to finally figure out the answer to this question. I was like, Jack, is the hyena a cat or a dog? Because they, hyenas, have some cat characteristics, some cat behaviors, but they also have some dog behaviors. And he goes, we made those terms up. There are no cats and dogs.

• 46:47Michael Stevens?

  And I've been like, oh, my gosh, you're right. The hyena just is what it is. This also reminds me of a question that vets apparently get asked a lot, veterinarians. A lot of dog owners go, hey, uh, does my dog know that I'm a human? Or does it just think that I'm a weird kind of dog? And that's a great way to keep in mind that these categories were invented by us. There's stuff in the universe with properties. And we kind of have to make that reality take the shape that we want.

• 47:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, we absolutely do. We absolutely do.

• 47:24Michael Stevens?

  Are we in a position to give an award? Like, given everything that we've concluded, what is the most vegetable vegetable?

• 47:33Hannah Fry?

  So what have we gone through? We've got the emotional heart, the emotional reaction, the moral obligation. We've got the non-sexiest parts.

• 47:43Michael Stevens?

  Yep, which is like the botanical definition.

• 47:45Hannah Fry?

  We've got the ethical parts. We've got the slowest growing parts.

• 47:49Michael Stevens?

  We've got the cultural.

• 47:52Michael Stevens?

  Vibes.

• 47:53Hannah Fry?

  Expectation.

• 47:55Michael Stevens?

  Annoyingly, the word vegetable, it actually used to mean basically the opposite of what it means today. It used to mean capable of life, vigor. Like, literally, vigor and vegetable come from the same source. So vegetable used to mean like living things as opposed to like rocks. So, I mean, you could even say that like, the very first vegetables were the stromatolite, you know, fossils that we've found from billions of years ago. Yes, I just threw yet another complication into the pot. The most vegetable vegetable, like, I think I'm still, I'm still gonna say carrot. I think that it's not sexy, it's a common, you know?

• 48:34Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. I've just, I just don't have it in my heart to agree with you. I just don't have it in my heart to agree with you. I'm.

• 48:39Michael Stevens?

  So what, are you still on the potato kick? Are you still thinking overcooked Brussels sprout?

• 48:45Hannah Fry?

  What I will say is this, basically, I want a reason to say potato.

• 48:48Michael Stevens?

  I think potato is really justifiable because it's also rooty and plain. So it fits a lot of the vibe definitions, it fits the botanical ones. I just don't know if a lot of people are gonna say potato when asked to name ten vegetables. Is potato gonna be in the first three?

• 49:08Hannah Fry?

  Look, here's my reason for going for potato. I just can't, I can't find it in my heart to agree with you about carrot. I think it's got too much human intervention. I think it's, you know, orange for the purposes of making it look all fancy. I'm, I'm, I'm just not impressed by it. You know, I'm sticking with the potato, and here's the reason why. There is no other boring edible part of a plant that can do so much on a plate. You can have chips, you can have, you know, boiled spuds, you can have mashed potato, you can have croquettes, you can have dauphinois. It's the Irish mixed grill. You can have any of those things. And, and I think it is the only vegetable that I would happily live on exclusively for the rest of my life. And that is why, it's an emotional argument,

• 49:51Hannah Fry?

  I'll admit, but that is why I'm sticking with, with potato as the best. And, and also, sorry, thank you very much, Amy, our producer. Not very sexy. There is nothing less sexy than a potato.

• 50:02Michael Stevens?

  That is a really convincing argument, Hannah. Because it's even making me think I might change my mind because carrots. Are kind of sweet. They've got a lot of sugar in them. If you've ever just like boiled a carrot down or drank carrot juice, it's like a smoothie, a sugary smoothie. But the potato.

• 50:21Hannah Fry?

  Potato juice is disgusting.

• 50:23Michael Stevens?

  It doesn't have any lofty ambitions to be fruity in, in, in, in nature. It's just there and, and you're right, it can be prepared in so many ways. It really takes advantage of the edibleness that we're requiring from the most vegetable vegetable. So potatoes, man.

• 50:42Michael Stevens?

  They might just deserve.

• 50:43Hannah Fry?

  Look, the Irish were on to something. The Irish absolutely knew what they were doing. And, uh, and that's our, that's our, I guess, our Oscar, as it were. Our, uh, our final prize goes to the potato.

• 50:52Michael Stevens?

  Cheers to the potatoes.

• 50:54Hannah Fry?

  Cheers to the potato, and I'm sure everybody watching completely agrees.

• 50:58Michael Stevens?

  I'm sure. And if you don't, let us know. Please reach out to us and be angry and immature. Or not. I'd prefer if you weren't. I'd prefer if you sent us in other questions. And we might answer your questions on a future episode of Field Notes. Send those to the rest is science at goalhanger.com.

• 51:15Hannah Fry?

  And that is it for this episode. Make sure you're following us wherever you get your podcasts. And we will see you on Thursday for another episode of Field Notes and on Tuesday again for our main episode. Until then.

• 51:25Michael Stevens?

  See you guys then. Bye bye.

• 51:37Speaker 06

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• 52:06Michael Stevens?

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• 52:17Michael Stevens?

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