Food Theory: Vegetables Are NOT Real!

Lets play a game. I'm going to show you some

food

s and I want you to tell me what category they fall into. Ready? Come on. If you guessed vegetable, you are wrong. No, it is not a vegetable. Correct! It is not a vegetable. Except it totally is. Confused? You should be. Vegetables are not

real

. There is no such thing and I can prove it. Hello Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the show that's as nutritious as those leafy greens. This is a topic that I have been passionate about for quite some time. Not only because I have to listen to one more person say: Did you know that tomato is not a vegetable?

I'm going to break up, but because the

vegetables

are lies. All those times I was told I had to finish the soggy, unseasoned

vegetables

on my plate were my villain's origin story. And today I can finally get my revenge by proving to you and the world that vegetables aren't

real

. Can you hear me. They are a figment of our society's imagination, grouped together and stuffed into the

food

pyramid as a way to make young children pay a toll for dessert. I'm not happy to bother with vegetables here a bit. I mean that the entire category of the food pyramid needs to be eliminated.

Are you ready? I'm about to make all of our collective six-year-old dreams come true and make vegetables disappear from your food vocabulary forever. I can tell that some of you are skeptical. You might even think I'm full of shiitake mushrooms. It's an absurd premise, right? I mean, a whole food group is fake? And I listen to you. So let's start little by little. First, what is a vegetable? It may seem like a pretty obvious answer. We know what vegetables are. Most of us eat them every day. Amy eats nothing but vegetables. So how do we define it?

If you're stuck, it's not just you. Even old Miriam is woefully useless. Generally herbaceous plant grown as an edible part and usually eaten as part of a meal. Basically, any plant that we can use to produce food. Things get worse if we look at the origin of the word. Vegetable was first used in the 15th century, loosely describing neither animal nor mineral. Thanks 15th century guy. If it's not an animal, it's a vegetable. Water? Vegetable. This table? Vegetable. Obviously that doesn't help us at all. You can immediately see the problem here. By modern definition, these are all vegetables.

A pineapple is part of a plant grown for food. So is celery. And guess what? French fries are made directly from potatoes, which are part of a plant. Which means the scariest twist in today's episode is that McDonald's is the largest distributor of vegetables in the world. Yes. Obviously, this cannot be a definition of vegetables because it includes all starches and fruits and literally every part of every plant under the sun and earth. That's nothing like what we're looking for and isn't really a working definition of anything. However, leaving the dictionary aside, the culinary world does not have a good definition for them either.

They are practically all plants. Really, the only distinction made is to make an exception for fruits, which really comes down to culinary application, such as whether they are used in desserts or not. Vegetables are usually harder and have a milder flavor than fruits due to their lower sugar content. And some other definitions state that they probably need to be cooked to be eaten. But that being said, there are many vegetables that do not require cooking. Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, pretty much anything you can add to a salad. Another common distinction people make is that vegetables have a savory flavor and are used in savory dishes.

Again, a huge list of exceptions. Shallots, carrots, and beets, especially when cooked, are sweet. There are also definitions of vegetables that define them as green leaves or non-woody parts of plants. But alas, I have to be that guy again and point out that there are quite a few exceptions. I'm sure most of you have already come to this counterpoint, but I'll say it anyway. Not all vegetables are green. Sure, there are many who are, but many who are not. And when it comes to woody, no, and you know it, bamboo shoots are edible, very common in East Asian cuisine and are considered a vegetable.

So even that rudimentary distinction between vegetables and fruits and the definition itself are completely nonsense. TLDR, there is no definition of a vegetable that isn't immediately refuted by a ton of other vegetables. So where does that leave us? What the heck are we really eating? Let's back up for a second and focus on the humble tomato. The whole thing about it being a fruit arises from the botanical definition of fruit. And fortunately, the definition of fruit is not completely banana like vegetables are. Well, whatever, you know what I mean. In botany, the scientific classification of plants, the seed-bearing parts that develop from the mature ovary of a flowering plant are considered fruits.

If you remember, in fourth grade, when you labeled the parts of a plant, you did things like petals and stamens and all that jazz. Anything in that region is considered a fruit. Simply put, a fruit is something produced by a plant rather than the plant itself, specifically the reproductive part. By this definition, the tomato is the product of the Solanum lycopersicum plant, more commonly and easily called the tomato plant, proving that tomatoes are, in fact, fruits. However, what is more interesting is that this can be said for many vegetables. Cucumbers come from the Cucumis sativus plant.

Peppers are a product of the Capsicum annuum plant. Sweet corn, eggplants, all types of squash, peas and squash are actually fruits. In fact, a lot of the vegetables you eat every day, and even those your mother takes so much care of, are 100% fruits. And be careful because we are not only talking about fruits with skin and soft interior. This also includes things like the little florets of broccoli. They are the flower buds, the reproductive part of the plant. So is cauliflower, at least the tips, which are actually a flower. This also eliminates artichokes, capers, and zucchini blossoms if you play along at home.

And of course, all this fruit talk leaves us with the obvious question. If these vegetables are fruits, have we been mislabeling these two categories for years? Is it all fruit? No. Celery is not a fruit. Neither are radish, cabbage, spinach or rhubarb. There are a lot of other things to deal with here and although we've eliminated a good amount of this food category, we still have work to do. If even the science dedicated to naming it is completely useless, things are not looking very good for vegetables. But at least by removing all the fruits, we can agree that any part of the plant other than the reproductive part of the flower is fair game.

The thing is, this really lays the whole issue bare. But before we delve into that, do you know what is real? All those subscriptions that little by little are secretly accumulating without me realizing it. One week trials I forget to cancel and they renew automatically and suddenly I find myself paying for the pickle of the month club for an entire year. Well, today's sponsor, Rocket Money, is here to help. I use Rocket Money to get out of all those sticky subscription situations. Securely identifies recurring charges and cancels those unwanted subscriptions for you. I really wasn't kidding about the pickles.

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So to save more and spend less, join the over 5 million members like me using Rocket Money today. You can also unlock even more features with premium. So go to rocketmoney.com and remove food theorists or click the link in the description below to get started for free. That's rocketmoney.com, which eliminates food theorists to get started for free. And now that you're on your way to making that bread, let me show you what a vegetable looks like. Because now it's time to talk about cereals. Yes, cereals are plants. Cereals are the seeds of plants called cereals, wheat, rice, corn, barley, all cereals, all parts of plants.

Those grains are collected, ground into the fine powder we know as flour, mixed with water and yeast, and voila, bread. So, Matt's crazy dive into the history of the world according to bread? No sir, it's the history of the world according to vegetables. But cereals are seeds. And seeds are not vegetables, right? Technically they are not part of the plant. If anything, they are actually part of the fruit. Well, putting that can of worms aside for a moment, there are many seeds that are actually considered vegetables. You have peas, almost all beans and also, interestingly, corn.

Therefore, we cannot make the general distinction of removing seeds from the vegetable category. Oh no, did I just redefine bread as fruit? Luckily for my sanity, no. One thing all the seeds I listed have in common is that they come from herbaceous plants that do not produce fruit in the botanical sense. They do not develop in fruit, so seeds and bread can comfortably fit into the cereal category they already fall into. But they won't be alone for long. Look, we've eliminated a lot of foods formerly known as vegetables and assigned them to fruit categories. But we are left with many things that are considered distinctive characteristics of the vegetable category.

Things like celery, spinach and carrots. The easiest to peel and package are carrots, which are not and have never been a vegetable. Carrots, along with garlic, beets, potatoes, yams, and anything else you can dig up, are geophytes. Botanically, geophytes are plants with a bulb where they store energy. Think everything from chives to tulips to potatoes, and include a large category of foods that have been misclassified as vegetables. These are what we would normally consider starchy vegetables. But they are nothing like vegetables like celery or green beans in taste, texture, or nutritional content. They are much closer to bread than spinach.

So much so that in some things like a ketogenic diet, these types of foods like carrots, beets, potatoes and even onions are prohibited. If you still need convincing on this, the USDA is considering reclassifying potatoes as a grain in 2025 because they make no sense as a vegetable. Everything that is in this category already is or will soon be recognized for what it is. Basically a very vegetable bread. Instead of vegetables, this category should now be called seeds and starches. So we've thrown out most of the old vegetables and turned them into fruits or seeds and starches.

Is it like that? What remains then? Well, there remains one group of foods, much smaller than the one we originally started with, that almost all fall into the stems and leaves category. Makes you feel like you're nibbling in your own backyard, doesn't it? It's not that attractive. Some of the most common vegetables in our collective diet come from this remaining category. And at the end of the day, this is the closest we get to a vegetable in the real world. All your leaves, spinach, kale, cabbage, kohlrabi, mustard greens, kale, watercress, chickweed, which is real, are exactly what they seem.

The leaves, the celery, the rhubarb, the bamboo, the sugar cane, they are all stems. Finally, a category of things that actually make sense to fit together. These two food groups are consumed because they are high in fiber, extremely low in calories, and sometimes have the added benefit of an additional mineral such as iron or calcium. If there was anything in the world that truly qualified as a vegetable, this would probably be it. That being said, we have already shown that the definition of a vegetable is scorched earth. The gum I chewed this morning was probably a vegetable by today's standards.

In reality, it would be much more appropriate to take this small group of foods with a botanically appropriate name: stems and leaves. Not only does this tell you what you're eating, it doesn't hide the idea that it will probably be uncomfortably good for you. And if you have any hope of reaching an empty plate, you better be prepared to cook these things in lots of butter. It's honest, simple and non-vegetable. Because there are no vegetables. In the end, what you thought werevegetables 15 minutes ago has never been and will never continue to be what popular culture tells you a vegetable is.

Because from a nutritional, botanical and even a minimum of common sense point of view, it is clear that they fit into practically all other food categories, without vegetables needing to be one of them. So the next time you pick up a carrot, know that you are eating starch. The next time you crave fruit, you'll find a cucumber competing with apples and oranges. And when someone tries to call broccoli a vegetable, let them know that there is no such thing. You're eating a flower, topped with lots of cheese, hopefully. Like so many other topics on this channel, knowing that vegetables don't exist can free you from the idea that you have to eat them without knowing why.

Now you can choose your foods based on what they actually do for your body and what part of the plant they come from. Not because they arose from some random variety of fruits, roots and stems that are completely different and give your body completely different things. And just like the archaic food pyramid, which is now just a plate, it's time to gradually eliminate the word vegetable from our vocabulary, never again to use it as the guardian of all things sweet after dinner. But until then, the next time your mom tells you to eat vegetables, feel free to grab that handful of breadsticks.

But hey, that's just a

theory

. A food

theory

. Enjoy.