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Comment by vilhelm_s | Hacker News Reader

My favorite article on this topic is Edward Z. Yang's "Tomatoes are a subtype of vegetables", which illustrates function contravariance with very charming drawings.

http://blog.ezyang.com/2014/11/tomatoes-are-a-subtype-of-veg...

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Technically (botanically) Tomatoes are actually a subtype of fruits. (they contain seeds)

In every sense tomatoes are fruit, not just technically.

Except in a legal sense.

http://www.businessinsider.com/supreme-court-tomato-is-veget...

No, just botanically.

You can't make jam from tomatoes. Or at least it wouldn't be called jam. You can make jam from rhubarb, so in some sense that is a fruit.

Similarly, you can make soup out of tomatoes, but not out of rhubarb.

So, from the point of view of a cook, tomatoes can be considered vegetables and rhubarb fruit.

Tomato jam I haven't seen but there is Tomato Chutney (and yes, it's sweet).

There are recipes out there for rhubarb soup and tomato jam (nothing fancy, just search on either term).

There's also strawberry soup (http://www.food.com/recipe/strawberry-soup-122037) and carrot jam (http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/carrot-jam).

I think we need fuzzy classes. :-)

Tomatoes are not generally considered culinary fruits, so there is, in fact, a sense of "fruit" on which tomatoes are not fruits. They are biological fruits, which is what someone who invokes a "technical" sense likely means.

Yeah. For some reason some people seem to think that some contexts are superior to others just because the context concerns the scientific background, even though everyone has a prior conext in mind which is the social default.

In a precise language it is obviously utterly useless to have homonyms that are not just distinct but opposed in meaning, unless one is the inferior. Of course that depends on context, because language is inherently underspecified (i think), but i like to think that the acclaim of is the more general, here, whereas cooking actually isn't predominantly concerned with names.

Botanics and cooking are different domains with vaguely overlapping but fundamentally different vocabularies. There is nothing wrong with that, our brains and our social constructs are equipped to deal with that. In culinary context, tomatoes are not fruit. Rationale? Just one example: they are usually not used as dessert topping, whereas fruit is.

"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."

attributed to Miles Kington

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