upatsix.com - Your Source For Pet Bird Information

Diego's Mom, Lisa wrote:How do tiels know the difference between veggies and fruit by just looking at them? Most tiels won't eat fruit, but how do they know they don't like it even without trying it? I mean, there are some fruits that kind of look like the veggies we feed them.

Wikipedia wrote:The word "vegetable" is a culinary term, not a botanical term. The word "fruit" on the other hand can be a culinary term or a botanical term.

Botanically speaking, fruits are fleshy reproductive organs of plants, the ripened ovaries containing one or many seeds. Thus, many botanical fruits are not edible at all, and some are actually extremely poisonous. In a culinary sense however, the word "fruit" is only applied to those botanical fruits which are edible, and which are considered to be a sweet or dessert food such as strawberries, peaches, plums etc.

In contrast to this, a number of edible botanical fruits, including the tomato, the eggplant, and the bell pepper are not considered to be a sweet or dessert food, are not routinely used with sugar, but instead are almost always used as part of a savory dish, and are salted. This is the reason that they are labeled as "vegetables".

In other words it is quite legitimate for a plant part to be scientifically referred to as a "fruit", even though it is used in cooking or food preparation as a vegetable.