PLEASE tell us how vegetables are a social... - The Massive Continuity of Ducks

Anonymous: PLEASE tell us how vegetables are a social construct

bemusedlybespectacled:

so a long time ago humans were trying to figure out edible plant matter, right

and because they didn’t have fucking microscopes or anything they were like “okay we have to divide them in some way that is easy for us to figure out”

so they COULD have divided them up by like, color or some shit

like all the red things are called noogles and all the orange ones are called fuckips and all the yellow ones are called snarglebutts or whatever

but they didn’t

they divided them by taste, which makes sense if you’re trying to sort edible plant matter, the whole point is eating them so why not sort them by the most likely reason you need to know the difference between them

so all the sweet tasting things are called fruits and all the not sweet tasting things are called vegetables

except like other than that there’s no rhyme or reason to it at all??

like potatoes are roots and broccoli is a flower and pumpkins are fruits and celery are stocks

but we’re putting them together because they don’t taste sweet

and lemons are juicy and wet but not sweet but they’re fruit for some reason but tomatoes aren’t even though they’re also juicy but not sweet and carrots aren’t even though carrots can be sweet

meanwhile apples are genetically more closely related to fucking roses than they are to shit like blueberries but because they both taste good in pie we put apples and blueberries in the same group and roses are a different thing

like, there’s a good reason why we sort plants this way, and that reason is “it’s easier to make food if you know vaguely what it tastes like beforehand,” and sorting plants by genetic family also makes sense if your reasoning is “i want to know what plants are related,” but they’re both sorting groups that humans made up and we could just as easily sort by color or shape if we decided that was an important thing we needed to know and that’s why it’s a social construct

animatedamerican:

anerdyfeminist:
I LIVE for “how is X a social construct argle bargle!!1!!!1????” takedowns.
So you know that post of mine about the difference between observed facts and constructed models? This is another perfect example, because the question of whether or not we call something a “fruit” depends on which model we’re using: botanical or culinary.
Cooks are not wrong for putting zucchini and celery and onion and carrot all in the same category called vegetable while putting cherry and strawberry and rhubarb together in a different category called fruit. And botanists are not wrong for taking those same items and grouping zucchini, cherry, and strawberry together as fruits, celery and rhubarb together as stalks, and onion and carrot together as roots.
(And for those of us who grew up with the Jewish religious tradition of saying different blessings on different kinds of food, there’s yet another categorization: fruit that grows from trees, and fruit-or-other-produce that grows from the ground. Of the above foods listed, only the cherry goes in the first category. Our criteria for categorizing doesn’t match either culinary or botanical, and we’re not wrong either.)
Categories are useful – sometimes crucial, even – but it is deeply important to remember that we invented them and we can change them or throw them out whenever they stop being useful.