Is A Pumpkin A Fruit Or A Vegetable?

Inquiring minds might want to know, is the orange orb popular for Halloween and fall decorations a fruit or vegetable? The answer may surprise you. A pumpkin is, in fact, a fruit.

According to expert Joe Masabni, Ph.D.,  vegetable specialist in the Texas A&M Department of Horticultural Sciences said scientifically speaking, pumpkins are a fruit because anything that starts from a single flower is classified botanically as a “simple fruit.”

Do you consider a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?

Usually, fruits and vegetables have been named according to how they are consumed. How people eat them versus how people see them is often different. 

“We see them as to whether we eat them as a dessert, salad or as part of a meal,” Masabni said.

Consider a cucumber or tomato. People don’t typically eat them as desserts, he said. They eat them in a salad or cooked in a meal, so they are associated with vegetables, even though they are really fruit.

“The pumpkin is a tricky one though,” he said, “because some people make soups or stews from pumpkins, which is a meal, while others make pies, which is a dessert. So that can lead to confusion.”

What is the difference between a fruit and a vegetable?

The difference between a fruit and a vegetable is established in how they grow.

“All plants start from seedlings,” Masabni said. “Let’s take the example of lettuce as a vegetable. It makes more and more leaves, and then you harvest it and eat those leaves. If you let it go even longer, it will eventually make a flower stalk and make seeds for next year’s crop.”

A pumpkin starts the same; however, their flowers become the pumpkin we eat.

“A pumpkin starts with a small plant and a few leaves, and as the leaves grow and more branches develop, flowers will start to bloom on the plant,” he said. “Those flowers then need to be pollinated by bees or other pollinators. Once that flower is pollinated, it develops into a fruit that we consume. So ultimately, fruit relies on pollination of the flower to become the thing we eat.”

What other ‘vegetables’ are actually fruits?

Although we may classify fruits and vegetables based on their sweet and savory tendencies or where they go in our meals, many types of produce we think of as vegetables are actually fruits, simply because they come from a flower.

Cucumbers, olives, tomatoes, eggplants, avocadoes, corn, zucchini, okra, string beans, peppers and, of course, pumpkins are all technically fruit.

Now that the debate is settled scientifically, the biggest decision is how to consume your fruits and vegetables and do you change the association according to what is on your plate?

“The fruit and vegetable debate is a fun one that hangs on the technical horticulturist/scientific view of these plants that we consume,” Masabni said. “At the end of the day, we want to inform people, but we also want them to enjoy these plants as gardeners and at the dinner table.”