Fruits vs. Vegetables

On Saturday, I was having a supper of pizza and beer with some cousins of mine after we had won a volleyball tournament. And realized that my cousins have some strange beer concoctions: one putting green olives in his beer while the other adding tomato sauce. Kinda of weird, I know! But the bowl of green olives that was brought by our waitress for the beer sparked some interesting conversation. I having never tried a green olive was interested in tasting them and learning a little bit more about them.

If someone were to ask me whether I thought an olive was a fruit or a vegetable, I would have said a vegetable. But on Saturday I concluded that an olive is the only vegetable that I could think of that grew on a tree. So is an olive really a vegetable? Or is it a fruit? I wasn't sure. So we discussed.

"Isn't the difference between a fruit and a vegetable only the fact that fruits have seeds?" Well that's what I always thought.

"Um, I don't know about that, but I remember hearing that the difference between a fruit and a vegetable is that a vegetable fully ripens on its vine or plant, whereas a fruit does not fully ripen till after it is picked." Which was my cousin's two-cents worth.

"Oh like a banana," I commented. "It doesn't really ripen until way after you buy it in the store."

"Exactly!" he responded. Interesting information, I thought.

"But an olive grows on a tree right?"

"Yeah, because there's all this talk about olive branches..."

"Oh yeah that's right!"

But does an olive, black or green, fully ripen on the vine or after it's picked!? I still don't know! So after accessing Google and then the beautiful source of Wikipedia, I now know that the olive is a fruit... Who knew?

Another source says a fruit comes from a flower, much like apple trees have blossoms and tomato plants have flowers as well, but vegetable do not. But it seems like every source has a different answer, so who really knows the actual truth!?

Besides, if my brain is only so big and can only hold so much information, this is probably not something to waste that space on! And this is probably way too intellectual of a conversation to be discussing over pizza and beer!

"How 'bout them Hawkeyes, huh?"