Vegetable

Farmers' market showing vegetables for sale in Lhasa, Tibet.

Vegetables in a supermarket in the United States.

The noun vegetable means an edible plant or part of a plant, but usually excludes seeds and most sweet fruit. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant but also includes some fruits as well (such as squash).

In a non-biological sense, the meaning of this word is largely based on culinary and cultural tradition. Therefore, the application of the word is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. For example, some people consider mushrooms to be vegetables even though they are not biologically plants,^[1][2] while others consider them a separate food category.^[3]

Some vegetables can be consumed raw, some may be eaten cooked, and some must be cooked in order to be edible. Vegetables are most often cooked in savory or salty dishes. However, a few vegetables are often used in desserts and other sweet dishes, such as rhubarb pie and carrot cake. A number of processed food items available on the market contain vegetable ingredients and can be referred to as "vegetable derived" products. These products may or may not maintain the nutritional integrity of the vegetable used to product them. Examples of vegetable-derived products are ketchup, tomato sauce, and vegetable oils.

Vegetables in market

Melon Yard at Heligan Cornwall England

"Vegetable" comes from the Latin vegetabilis (animated) and from vegetare (enliven), which is derived from vegetus (active), in reference to the process of a plant growing.

The word "vegetable" was first recorded in English in the 15th century,^[4] and originally applied to any plant. This is still the sense of the adjective "vegetable" in biological context.^[5] In 1967, the meaning of the term "vegetable" was specified to mean "plant cultivated for food, edible herb or root." The year 1955 noted the first use of the shortened, slang term "veggie". ^[6]

As an adjective, the word vegetable is used in scientific and technical contexts with a different and much broader meaning, namely of "related to plants" in general, edible or not — as in vegetable matter, vegetable kingdom, vegetable origin, etc.^[5] The meaning of "vegetable" as "plant grown for food" was not established until the 18th century.^[7]

[edit] Terminology

An Euler diagram shows the overlap in the terminology of "vegetables" in a culinary sense and "fruits" in the botanical sense

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