Botanic fruit and culinary fruit

Many foods are botanically fruit but are treat as vegetables in cooking. These contain cucurbits (e.g., squash, pumpkin, and cucumber), tomato, peas, beans, corn, eggplant, and sweet pepper, spices, such as allspice and chillies. Occasionally, however rarely, a culinary "fruit" will not be a true fruit in the botanical sense. For example, rhubarb may be measured a fruit, though only the astringent petiole is edible. In the commercial world, European Union rules define carrot as a fruit for the purposes of measure the proportion of "fruit" enclosed in carrot jam. In the culinary sense, a fruit is usually any sweet tasting plant produce associated with seed, a vegetable is any savoury or a smaller amount sweet plant product, and a nut any hard, oily, and shelled plant product.

Although a nut is a type of fruit, it is also a popular term for safe to eat seeds, such as peanuts (which are actually a legume) and pistachios. Technically, a cereal grain is a fruit term a caryopsis. However, the fruit wall is especially thin and fused to the seed coat so almost all of the safe to eat grain is actually a seed. Therefore, cereal grains, such as corn, wheat and rice are better measured edible seeds, although some references list them as fruits. Edible gymnosperms seeds are often dishonestly given fruit names, e.g. pine nuts, ginkgo nuts, and juniper berries.