Walk through any grocery store in October and you'll find pumpkins stacked near the potatoes and squash, not the apples and grapes. We roast them, stuff them into soups, and turn them into pie. Nobody puts a pumpkin in a fruit salad. So how can anyone call it a fruit?
The short answer is that botanists and cooks use different rules. In botany, a fruit is the part of a flowering plant that forms from the flower's ovary and holds the seeds. A pumpkin grows from a flower and is packed with seeds, so it's a fruit. In fact, it's a special type of berry called a pepo. In the kitchen, though, it's treated as a vegetable.
Two Ways to Sort Your Produce
In everyday cooking, fruit usually means something sweet or tart that you can eat raw, like apples, bananas, oranges, and strawberries. Vegetables are the savory parts of plants that end up in main dishes. That's a perfectly useful system, but it isn't the one scientists use.
In botany, any ripened seed-bearing structure that develops from a flower counts as fruit. That sweeps in plenty of things we'd never call fruit at the dinner table: cucumbers, squash, beans, peas, peanuts, corn, eggplant, bell peppers, and tomatoes. Even some spices, like black pepper and cumin, are fruits botanically speaking. By the botanist's rulebook, a pumpkin is every bit as much a fruit as an apple or an orange.
It also works the other way around. Rhubarb often shows up in pies alongside strawberries, but the part we eat is actually a leaf stalk, not a fruit at all.
The Supreme Court Weighed In
This debate once went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the case was about tomatoes. In 1893, in Nix v. Hedden, the Court unanimously ruled that tomatoes should be treated as vegetables for tariffs and import taxes. The reason was that the law used the everyday meaning of the words, not the botanical one.
So, legally and in the kitchen, tomatoes and pumpkins can be vegetables. Botanically, they're fruits. Both answers are correct, depending on who's asking.
An Ancient American Crop
Pumpkins are among the oldest known domesticated plants. Fragments found in Mexico date to between 7,000 and 5,500 BC. Wild relatives and the earliest domesticated kinds are native to North America, in parts of today's northeastern Mexico and the southern United States.
Many Indigenous North American societies grew squash alongside corn and beans in a method called the Three Sisters. Even the word may have American roots. One theory traces pumpkin to a Massachusett word meaning "grows forth round," though the Oxford English Dictionary traces it to an older word, pompion, from Greek.
From Turnips to Jack-o'-Lanterns
Carving faces into vegetables for Halloween started in Ireland, Scotland, and other parts of Britain, where people used turnips and rutabagas. Immigrants to North America switched to native pumpkins, which were plentiful and much bigger, making them far easier to carve.
Pumpkins can get truly enormous. Most weigh 6 to 18 pounds, but in October 2023, a record-setting pumpkin tipped the scales at 2,749 pounds. That's one very big berry.
So when you slice into a pumpkin pie this fall, you can tell the table you're enjoying a fruit dessert. Just maybe wait until after everyone has had seconds.
