I think the question is about the cultural taxonomy, not the scientific one. For instance, culturally, tomatoes are often a vegetable in the United States, but botanically they're a berry and therefore a fruit. A culture could either treat fungus as in the "plant" category or not in the "plant" category and both would be culturally reasonable.

(It's also an error to claim that it's "wrong" to call a tomato a vegetable. Words have different meanings, and you're in for a lifetime of frustration if you go around insisting that cultures are only permitted to use all words in exactly the way that scientists use them.)

Fruit/berry are biological distinctions, I think, whereas vegetable-ness is mostly culinary.

I recall reading an argument refuting this, but it didn't alter my way of differentiating.

Hm no. Ask your waitress for a bowl of oatmeal with berries and they bring tomatoes, you will be upset.

> Ask your waitress for a bowl of oatmeal with berries and they bring tomatoes, you will be upset.

Right, because if you ask your waitress, you expect culinary rather than biological definitions to be used.

Then again, you'd usually ask for something more specific than "berries".

The issue is domain-specific definitions. It causes a lot of misunderstandings. A common issue is the meaning of the word theory.

You'd probably be upset if they brought raw cranberries or poisonous juniper berries too.

Yes. Oatmeal is culinary. What's your point?

Read it again. Fruit/berry was proposed as not being culinary.

In context, it was clearly saying that a tomato is a fruit/berry in a biological context, but a vegetable in a culinary one. That doesn't mean that those words don't also have different meanings in other contexts.

Many years ago I worked as a cashier in a supermarket. There tomatoes had their own classification as "salad".

Just as coffee "beans" are actually seeds. This information is of no use to the vast majority of people unless one finds it enjoyable to be pedantic, but it is a neat bit of trivia all the same.

> Just as coffee "beans" are actually seeds.

All beans are seeds. Except "sea beans", which aren't beans, either.

And NetBeans.