We just ignoring the mushrooms are also fruit(ing bodie)s?

Vegetable is a culinary category, with no botanical/biological definition. I don’t see a reason why mushrooms don’t belong in it.

Tomatoes will always be a vegetable to me. And I base that entirely on vibes.

A “vegetable” is simply any edible part of a plant. Fruits can therefore be considered a subcategory of vegetables.

If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, an ear of corn is botanically a fruit, since it’s the seed-bearing body of a plant. But nobody in their right mind would consider corn a fruit.

I have a simple flowchart to determine what is or isn’t a veggie:

> Can I eat it? -> Yes -> Does it come from an animal? -> No = Vegetable

In spanish tomatoes are called “hortalizas”, the others are “verduras” apart of “frutas”, fruits, in english only traduced with vegetables and fruits. Maybe because Spain has a better food culture. Mushrooms are something in between plants and animals in a separate genre, some even are actively moving to find food. The US anyway differences only protein, sugar and decoration, tomatoes in bottles from Heinz.

Tomatoes are biologically fruit, but culinarily they are a vegetable.

You wouldn’t expect them to put an orange slice on your burger because you asked for some veg, would you? But you’d expect tomatoes, tomatoes are veg outside of any scientific context. Language is fickle. Life is complicated. Reality defies categorization.

What? Who’s calling pumpkins, squashes, and cucumbers vegetables?

And no one calls mushrooms vegetables: mushrooms are mushrooms.