Pumpkin: Fruit or Vegetable – Simply Explained

Pumpkin – is it a fruit or a vegetable?

The pumpkin is just as associated with autumn as the colorful leaves on the trees and the somewhat heartier dishes such as the popular pumpkin soup, the spicy pumpkin chutney, or the low-calorie pumpkin spaghetti.

• If you start from the dishes in which the pumpkin is used, the decision is easy: the pumpkin is a vegetable. Especially since it also meets other criteria that are attributed to the vegetable.
• This includes, for example, that the vegetable plants are only annuals, occasionally biennials. In short: they have to be sown anew every year.
• In contrast to fruit plants, such as berry bushes or apple, pear, and cherry trees, which often exist for many decades and regularly bear fruit.
• Thus, the life expectancy of a plant is one of the most striking and obvious differentiating criteria when it comes to the question: fruit or vegetables?
• But here, too, exceptions prove the rule: rhubarb is a perennial plant and would therefore belong to fruit. In addition, the plant is often used for sweet dishes, such as rhubarb compote and not to forget the popular rhubarb cake, and the delicious rhubarb liqueur. But this is a vegetable.

 

Pumpkin – neither a fruit nor a vegetable, but something in between

Flavor is another key differentiator between fruits and vegetables. Fruit usually tastes sweet due to its high fructose content. Although there are a few exceptions, as some berry varieties show.

• As already mentioned at the beginning, the pumpkin is mostly used in the kitchen for hearty dishes. It is also an annual plant that is replanted every year. So the pumpkin should actually be a vegetable.
• Wrong: Even if the pumpkin is often assigned to the vegetable, from a botanical point of view it belongs to the so-called fruit vegetable.
• The fruit vegetable is an additional category created by botanists for plants that share characteristics of both fruit and vegetables.
• The pumpkin is an annual plant and therefore a vegetable – theoretically. This is contradicted by the fact that the pumpkin develops from a pollinated flower. This in turn is clearly a criterion for fruit. Accordingly, the pumpkin comes in the intermediate category: the fruit vegetable.
• In addition to the pumpkin, the fruit vegetables also include the tomato, the cucumber and the melon.