You’ve Been Lied To: The Truth About Vegetables

If you’ve ever wondered what makes a vegetable a vegetable… don’t. It’s all made up anyway.

Vegetables aren’t real. There, I said it. Now, most of you are probably looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. And you know what? Maybe I have. But that’s beside the point. The point is that vegetables do, in fact, have no actual basis in reality. “But Colin, look, what about this piece of broccoli right here? Isn’t this a vegetable?”

Glossing over the fact that you just so happened to have a head of broccoli on hand—no, it isn’t actually a vegetable. It’s an immature flower head (I can think of a few people who also fit this description) of the plant Brassica oleracea var. italica. In other words, it’s the part of the plant that would eventually bloom into flowers.

Speaking of broccoli, an interesting fact I discovered while doing the research for this article is that it actually belongs to the cabbage family—sharing a species with cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi. All those “vegetables” are just different cultivars of the same ancestral plant. Alright, what about carrots then? Those have to be vegetables, don’t they?

Well, no—because vegetables don’t exist, haven’t you been paying attention? Carrots are actually a root, believe it or not. More specifically, they’re the edible taproot of the plant Daucus carota, harvested before the plant enters its flowering (second-year) phase. Their primary purpose is to store energy to fuel flowering and seed production later on.

Now you point to the potatoes, meekly, without quite as much conviction as you had when referring to the carrots and the broccoli. Because by now, you know better than to doubt me outright. Because you know I have receipts. Potatoes are actually modified underground stems, known as stem tubers. These tubers store nutrients—primarily starch—and have “eyes”, which are actually stem buds. Each eye can sprout into a plant of its own.

Potatoes are part of the nightshade family, which also includes tomatoes, aubergines, and peppers. You may have heard that nightshades are poisonous, and that’s because the term “nightshade” partly derives from the famous toxic plant Atropa belladonna (“deadly nightshade”) that inhabits the same family. “But potatoes are one of the good nightshades, right? They’d never hurt anyone.” Think again.

In 2013, four members of a Russian family died in their closed basement where they’d stored potatoes for the winter. Local investigators concluded that the poisonous gas generated by the rotting potatoes was what did them in. Have you ever noticed how your potatoes turn green after a while? That’s because potatoes exposed to light start to produce chlorophyll. While harmless in and of itself, it’s also an indicator of increased levels of solanine—which is not quite so harmless.

But no need to panic. Removing the green bits and peeling the skin will usually suffice to make the potato safe to eat again. Just apply a touch of common sense and throw it out if it starts looking more like an unripe mango.

Alright, so we’ve gone over what isn’t a vegetable. But now the question is—what is? Why do we call these things vegetables when they’re not? Have we been living a lie this entire time? Are vegetables a psy-op perpetuated by Big Green to push some sort of nefarious horticultural agenda? All very valid questions. But the simple truth is this: the concept of vegetables boils down to a matter of convenience. Vegetables are, at their core, a culinary social construct.

Does that mean we need to start unplugging from the matrix and referring to what were formerly “vegetables” in strictly botanical terms? Well, no. Yes, vegetables are a social construct—but as far as social constructs go, it’s a useful one, and definitely worth keeping around. You see, if you start to dig deep enough into, well, anything, it all starts to look like a collective daydream.

Take countries, for instance. What weighty, permanent, and very serious things they seem to be. But they’re all made up. They only exist because people agree they do. Yugoslavia existed because people agreed it did, as did both East and West Germany. And when people stopped agreeing, those countries stopped existing.

Money makes the world go round, so they say. You’ll scarcely find anything held to a higher degree of importance—but that doesn’t change the fact it’s made up too. Currency holds value exclusively on the basis that we’ve all decided it should. Without that shared belief, what is money really, apart from germ-harbouring strips of paper or numbers in a computer?

Languages are yet another thing that aren’t real. Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien are considered dialects of the same language—despite being mutually unintelligible—purely because political forces insist on the idea of a unified Chinese speech community.

You can therefore end up with the surreal scenario where a Spanish speaker chats to someone who speaks only Portuguese—technically different languages—yet they’d almost certainly understand each other better than a native Mandarin speaker would understand a Cantonese speaker, even though those two are officially labelled as “dialects” of the same tongue.

Having said that, we still have to abide by countries, currencies, languages, and the like—not because they’re inherently “real”, but because pretending they are just makes things a lot easier. Our entire society hinges on that shared make-believe, and so we go along with it. Likewise, despite the fact that “vegetables” hold no botanical legitimacy, the culinary category is a hell of a useful fiction.

So when someone tries to tell you that broccoli or carrots “aren’t real” vegetables, you’re kind of hearing that same act of pretending. It wasn’t biology that made “vegetable” real—it was us. Sitting at menus, farmers’ markets, cooking shows—deciding it’s handy to lump edible plant parts into a convenient category. And so that’s exactly what we did.

Otherwise we’d be living in a world where bananas, cucumbers and watermelons count as berries—while strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and mulberries don’t. (And that’s a botanical fact, by the way.) If insisting on botanical correctness means turning the produce aisle into linguistic chaos, save your root-structure semantics and count me all in on the culinary illusion. Vegetables might not be real. They might just be a lie we live by—but thankfully, it’s a lie that feeds us just fine.

Opening image: Geneviève Berclaz