Vegetables, A Made-Up Category? And So?

A post from Slate is flying round the web.  Vegetables are a made-up category, the author Benjamin Phelan, a writer living in Louisville, suggests, because they do not belong to a single (biological) botanical group.  And therefore he suggest that vegetable is a fuzzy, cultural category, perhaps not to be taken seriously.

Quick and dirty.  Classifications are made for human purposes.  All classifications are made up. By us. For us. All are cultural. And all are fuzzy around the edges.  But that doesn’t mean they are not useful.

And it does not mean that the Linnean classification is primary.  Any object can be classified in various different ways.  Chalk for example can be classified as the chemical calcium carbonate, the geological formation in the upper Cretaceous, or the writing instrument for blackboards.  All capture some important aspect of chalk.  All are useful for different purposes.

Linnean categories are not the be-all and end-all for food.  For food, we want classifications that divide things up by  how they behave in the kitchen (culinary classifications). Or by how they taste (gastronomic classifications). Or by how they affect our bodies (nutritional classifications).

These do not map on to biological families.

Oils have common culinary properties. They come from lots of different biological families: cabbages, palms, legumes and so on.  Same is true of starches.

Cane sugar and beet sugar have the same culinary, gastronomic and nutritional properties.  They come from different biological families.

Proteins have common nutritional properties.  They come from lots of different biological families: fish, bovines, legumes and so on.

Every society has had several overlapping classifications for food.  In terms of the long history of nutritional classifications,  vegetables usually did not matter much. They did not supply much energy (what we would call calories) and since that was the major concern,  they were thus usually supplementary to the important foods: the meats, starches and oils that sustained a hard day’s labor. They ranged from delicious luxuries or the last resort for the poor.

Then in the early twentieth century vitamins were discovered. Protective foods, that is anything with lots of vitamins and minerals, zoomed in importance (while calories became all too easy to get).  Hence the glorification of vegetables. And probably rightly.   This is why vegetables dominate the latest food advice from the USDA.

So vegetables. Made up. Yes. Of course.  Not a biological category. No, of course not.

So the question for school lunch legislators and all the others who promote eating more vegetables should be: What are you trying to promote by putting things in the vegetable category?

If it is vitamins (and perhaps fibre), well then anything with lots of vitamins (including pills) counts as a vegetable. Perhaps including pizza.

Don’t get me wrong.  American school lunches sound pretty grim.  But invoking the lack of a Linnean classificatory basis to critique them just misses the point completely.

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