Food quiz: Can you tell if these foods are fruits or vegetables?

Olives

The British press is doing a lot to entertain themselves waiting for the Royal baby, and a good example is this test from the Telegraph, Do you know your fruit from your vegetables? Hint: This is based on a scientific definition rather than a culinary one. Go there now if you want to take the test without help.

For those who don't want to take the test, here's a rule of thumb: "The general rule is that an edible plant can be categorised as a fruit if it has seeds, but if it is seedless, it is generally a vegetable."

And here are the top ten fruits commonly mistaken as vegetables:

1) Peapods - only 1 per cent could name it as a fruit
2) Aubergine - 3 per cent (eggplant in the U.S.)
3) Olives - 3 per cent
4) Butternut squash - 4 per cent
5) Pumpkin - 7 per cent
6) Pepper - 9 per cent
7) Avocado - 12 per cent
8) Courgette - 14 per cent (squash in the U.S.)
9) Cucumber - 34 per cent
10) Tomato - 52 per cent

3 comments

geoff@kupesoftware.comJuly 11, 2013

Yes, but the tomato, unlike the others, is legally a vegetable.

Except olives all off a vine.

geoff@kupesoftware.comJuly 15, 2013

In Australia we are told to eat two serves of fruit and five of vegetables each day. I keep wondering what is considered a vegetable, as so many of the 'vegetables' in my diet are really fruit (and the mushrooms are fungi, not plants at all...). Add the rule that potatoes are not meant to be counted, and it seems we are meant to eat a lot of broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, and carrots. sigh.

ellabeeJuly 11, 2013

It is flat incredible to me that a nation of gardeners would score so low on this fairly elementary quiz -- and it's even harder to see how the majority that understand that tomato is a fruit somehow don't apply that understanding to eggplant, a close cousin.