It's Probably Maybelline

Wait, did something big just happen? 

Well let me tell you.

Everybody and their cousin has experienced the argument “is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable” at some point in their lives. It’s a fun bit of trivia, and let’s know-it-all’s speak condescendingly, or at least they did like 10 years ago. “Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”. Whatever.

Which brings up the point, that botany and culinary sciences are very different. Botany is the study of plants, culinary is cooking and how things taste. Botany is science, and it has rules (kind of), where cuisine is full of guidelines that are completely cultural.

Tomatoes are a fruit. A fruit is how many plants have babies, and are made in the ovary of a flower. I have a diagram.

Armed with this knowledge we can know that tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, peas and peppers are all fruit.

“Now”, I ask you, “what are lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and kale”?

“Vegetables”, you say, assuredly.

“Yes, but, what are they?”

“…vegetables”, you say, slower, and louder this time, not quite sure what I’m wanting from you.

No. They are leaves.

What are carrots, beets and radishes? Roots. What about celery and rhubarb? Stems. Potatoes? Tubers (food storage for the plant, and where new plant babies will grow from). Garlic and onions? Bulbs (also food storage). Mushrooms? They’re not even a plant, they’re a fungus, in the kingdom of fungi, which is somewhere between the plant and animal kingdoms.

“Vegetables” is just a word for plants that we eat, that doesn’t have enough sugar to be a fruit, and not enough flavour to be a herb or spice.

Botanically speaking, there is no such thing as a vegetable. They’re just different parts of a plant that happen to be edible.

“Ramos had rescued his ego and, in the act, taken something from Williams and Osaka that they can never get back. Perhaps the most important job of all for an umpire is to respect the ephemeral nature of the competitors and the contest. Osaka can never, ever recover this moment. It’s gone. Williams can never, ever recover this night. It’s gone. And so Williams was entirely right in calling him a “thief.””

This is probably one of the best pieces of on deadline sportswriting that I’ve ever read.

“Can we talk about the fact that I’ve slept with five Matts?”

“I know no one cares, but this is illegal.”