Fruit and Veg

"Have you ever had an avocado smoothie?"

She asked with that pained look in her eyes. "It's so weird."

I was speaking with a new acquaintance at a party about food at a Vietnamese restaurant, and avocado smoothies were the thing that she couldn't get to like. I suppose it is that cognitive dissonance of taking something that one assumes is a savory item and making a sweet application with it. Then again, it is a fruit.

The haul from Santa Monica's Farmer's Market. The small green fuerte avocado is one of the creamiest avocados I've ever tasted. The small Japanese varietal tomato has almost no acid, being as sweet as a berry. And the yellow fruit is a limequat, a hybrid between a kumquat and a lime. The pen is there for scale purposes. 

I suspect that the main distinction between vegetables and fruit, outside of the botanical classification, is that savory applications are expected of vegetables, and fruit belong on sweet. This divide (in addition to the obvious tax exemption) probably drove the legal classification of tomatoes as vegetables. Nonetheless, tomatoes make great sorbets and other sweet applications.

Battlestar Strawberry

Many botanical fruits find their way in our vegetable categorization. Squashes are all fruits, and so are most grains (buckwheat isn't even a grass style grain). But what about vegetables as sweet items? You may not think of it, but technically, rhubarb is a vegetable (try it roasted some time). Sweet potato come in many varieties, and the sweet flavor makes them easy as dessert options. And botanically speaking, strawberries and figs are vegetables, too. Though it's hard to avoid eating the fruit along with the vegetable in those.