We all know the is-a-tomato-a-fruit debate (correct answer: yes, but you still shouldn’t put it in a fruit salad). Now we’d like to bring you a whole new botanical question you never knew you had: Is corn a fruit or a vegetable—or is it a grain?
The answer is more technical than you might think, and to fully understand it you’ll need a little primer on corn biology.
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We differentiate between fruits and vegetables depending on which bits of the plant we eat. If we eat the part derived from the ovaries or other reproductive tissue, we call it a fruit, explains Marvin Pritts, a horticulture researcher and professor at Cornell University. Everything else we call a vegetable. “Corn is a seed derived from the flower/ovary of the corn plant,” he says, “so is technically a fruit.”
Related on the SLP
More specifically, corn is a caryopsis, which is a type of fruit in which the pericarp (that’s the fleshy bit, like the part of a peach that you eat) and seed coat are fused tightly. This means they don’t have a substantial fleshy layer, helping them dry out well. You might know caryopses better by their common name: grains.
Read full, original article: Is corn a fruit, a vegetable, or a grain?
