Welcome back, Kisa. It's been a while.
Mangafanatic wrote:*comes kicking and screaming into thread*
Is a tomatoe a fruit or a vegetable?
I've never read X (some CLAMP club we are, eh?), but the tomato question is ambiguous at best. The simplest, and most correct answer to the question is "yes."
In one respect, it's rather like asking if a badger is a mammal or an animal since the term vegetable can refer to the whole of the plant kingdom as in the question of whether something is animal, vegetable, or mineral.
More commonly, though, I suppose it best to say that vegetable is a catch all for anything edible that doesn’t fit into any of our other common terms for edible plants – fruits (apples), nuts (walnuts), herbs (nutmeg), spices (pepper), or grain (wheat). Tuber is another term for an edible part of a plant, but it is not in common usage, so tubers (potatoes) are vegetables as well as other roots (carrots), stems (asparagus), and leaves (lettuce).
However, non-sweet fruits (beans), fleshy grain(corn), and seeds that are easily softened in water (peas) are often also considered vegetables.
Now, what is a tomato? It’s a plant from the nightshade family, which also includes potatoes and eggplant as well as the poisonous belladonna, better known as deadly nightshade. So, the tomato is in a family of vegetables, but it is the seed bearing meat of a flowering plant.
You should no by now, Osaka, that there are no easy answers, but I hope I have helped you along on your search for truth.