• MeadSteve@reddthat.com
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      2 days ago

      I absolutely call them vegetables. It’s a kitchen term and it absolutely makes sense to categorise them alongside tomatoes, beans, carrots, squash and cabbage. People get too hung up on things only belonging to exactly one category.

      • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 day ago

        Seriously this whole thing is not a problem at all unless you’re somehow not familiar with words having more meaning. It’s a fruit (botanically) and not a fruit (culinary). I don’t understand how we’ve gotten like 40 years of discussion out of it at this point.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      I believe, it’s a US thing. This is a quote from the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA):

      Other Vegetables: All other fresh, frozen, and canned vegetables, cooked or raw: for example, asparagus, avocado, bamboo shoots, beets, bitter melon, Brussels sprouts, cabbage (green, red, napa, savoy), cactus pads (nopales), cauliflower, celery, chayote (mirliton), cucumber, eggplant, green beans, kohlrabi, luffa, mushrooms, okra, onions, radish, rutabaga, seaweed, snow peas, summer squash, tomatillos, and turnips.

      Source: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans-2020-2025.pdf (page 28)

      I’ve read elsewhere that the reason for the DGA to conflate them, is because mushrooms have comparable nutrients to vegetables. So, from a dietary and regulatory viewpoint, it makes some amount of sense. But yeah, I feel like you could have just had a category “vegetables & mushrooms”.

    • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Take a piece of paper with 3 squares drawn on it

      And hand a person a picture of an apple, tomato, pepper, cucumber, pork cutlet, and mushroom and ask them to put the pictures into the squares and then label each square

      Average person will definitely label a box as vegetables and put the mushrooms in it

      • Lumidaub@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        Well if you tell me to use only three categories and one of them will obviously be “meat”, then I won’t put them with apples.

        • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          One box labeled “Brown when cooked properly”. Then mushrooms can go in the box with the apples and cutlets.

        • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Apple, tomato, peppers, and cucumbers are all fruits

          Mushrooms are mushrooms

          Pork is meat

          But if you give the average person those it’s much more likely they will make the categories fruits, vegetables, and meat and put mushrooms in the vegetable category

      • Vespair@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        Why are we starting this scenario with the arbitrary restriction of 3? Yes, if you give people any number of items and tell them there is a finite number of categories, they were will find a way to divide those items into three. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t come up with a more compelling argument for their choices when told to divide into 4 groups.

        At no point have our options ever only been “fruit or vegetable,” but yeah I guess if you tell people those are their only choices of course they’ll adhere. But like… I’ve never known anyone who though those were the only choices?

        • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          The point is that may people will instinctually call mushrooms a vegetable

          If we take that same example and add 4 categories and then add milk as another item I am still willing to bet the average person will put mushrooms as a vegetable and make the categories fruit vegetable dairy meat even though vegetables aren’t real and you could have a category of animal products.

          Now if you only quiz the biology majors you might get a different result but in the U.S. only 38% of people are college educated and the most common major is business