Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? This is often a hotly debated topic, but biologically speaking, there is a very simple answer to it. A simple understanding of what is a fruit, and what is a vegetable helps us easily classify pretty much all fruits and vegetables.

What is a fruit? What is a vegetable?

A fruit is the mature ovary of a seed bearing plant. All other edible plant parts including leaves, roots and stems, are vegetables.

So how do you differentiate a fruit from a vegetable?

The easiest way to tell if something you’re having is a fruit or a vegetable is to see if it contains seeds or not. If it contains seeds, it’s a fruit. If it doesn’t, it’s a vegetable.

Therefore, tomato is definitely a fruit. So are apples, peaches, melons, papayas and grapes. Cucumbers, peas, beans, pumpkins, capsicums, peppers, etc. are also fruits even though they are culinarily often treated as vegetables.

Meanwhile potatoes, carrots, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflowers, etc. are all vegetables.