What's The Most "Vegetable" Vegetable?

14:17Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, I don't know enough about plants to really judge the least sexy plant part. But in the comments below, tell me who wins the award for least sexy plant part. Now, whether that means that it wins the big grand prize for being the most vegetable-iest is still a matter of debate. and maybe we'll resolve it in this episode.

14:36Hannah Fry:Can I just quickly do a side note, just because we're talking about accessory fruits and fruits that you eat more than just the ovary of the plum. Do you know how figs get fertilized?

14:48Michael Stevens:Well, it's with wasps, right?

14:50Hannah Fry:Right. So what happens is there's a very particular breed of wasp which has to fertilize and she climbs into the fig, into the base of the fig. And it's such a tight hole. that's where she goes and gives birth to her larvae which then wriggle out of the plant and go off elsewhere so it's basically a pregnant wasp climbs into the fig but the act of climbing in is so it's so small it rips her wings off and so over time the plant the fig has developed this i think it's an acid that dissolves her body and absorbs it into the fruit of the fig so when you eat a fig you are also eating not just a plant ovary but a dissolved pregnant wasp luckily it's

15:35Michael Stevens:dissolved the wing has been reincorporated into delicious figginess but yeah i mean the whole body not just the wing the whole body of the wasp so is a is a fig kind of a carnivore food is it less vegan because it's an animal has lost some parts that is a great question are figs vegan well to be fair though the wasp knows it's going to happen and is okay with it we aren't taking the wings from the wasp in order to make a fig i think i think we're going to get into

16:10Hannah Fry:definitions again quite quickly when we start talking about what a wasp doesn't doesn't know

16:14Michael Stevens:Right. Yeah. Our animal consciousness and intentions episode will come later. But ultimately, besides figs, what I love about fruit is that they are like one of the most ethical things to eat because the plant, in many cases, wants its fruit to be eaten. That's how it reproduces. It needs the seeds to go through your digestive system, come out in a nice little nutrient pile of manure and grow. So if you really wanted to be as ethical of a consumer of food as possible, you would need to eat fruits whose dispersal method includes being eaten. And you would need to then defecate outside, not into a toilet where the seed has no hope.

17:05Michael Stevens:other than that you are ending some part of or a whole living thing even if it's you know cinnamon no no cinnamon oh i shouldn't say cinnamon because you can take the bark off and i think the tree

17:16Hannah Fry:survives you you can so hang on we're now saying cinnamon is not only the most vegetable vegetable and the most unsexy part of a plant but also the most ethical food to consume i don't know if it

17:26Michael Stevens:is though i don't know if the tree likes its bark being pulled off yeah fair i think apple trees love their apples to be eaten. That's why they make them. They evolved it for consumption.

17:36Hannah Fry:But

17:37Michael Stevens:if I pluck a potato out of the ground, I'm like, your roots are mine. Same with carrots, which I think carrots are also a really culturally prototypical vegetable. So we're not here to give out Nobel Peace Prizes for vegetable consumption. But what we are looking for is what's the most vegetable vegetable. And I think that if there's anything fruity about it, it loses points. So if it is a ripened ovary or is part of it is a ripened ovary, it is not as vegetable-y to me. That means that pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, beans, and peas are all fruits botanically.

18:25Hannah Fry:I mean, tomato is the one that people talk about. That's the sort of one that's famous, but I didn't realize all of those.

18:32Michael Stevens:Those are all fruits botanically because they are ripened ovaries. Here's the one that blew my mind. Rice is a fruit. Grains of rice are just ripened ovaries from a rice plant. But hold on a second.

18:48Hannah Fry:So if you allowed rice to run its natural course without intervening and harvesting it, would grains of rice? No, they don't have seeds in them, do they?

19:00Michael Stevens:No, they're processed away. The seeds are there in the beginning, but then we just get the endosperm part, the food that was supposed to be for the seed to grow from. Instead, we grow from it. Take that, rice. So rice, not very vegetably to me, because it's too much of a fruit. It's a ripened ovary, or at least it's, I mean, the endosperm comes from the ovary. There's this whole, we could talk about plants forever. They're double fertilized. when pollen hits the plant, it not only creates an embryo, it also creates endosperm, which is in my mind, at least it's kind of like the, um, the placenta of the plant.

19:38Michael Stevens:It's like, here's, here's the nutrition that you're going to need as you grow little zygote embryo thing. And we eat that part, but I don't think we eat the rice seed or it's like, you know, when you take a peanut and you, and you break a little peanut in half and you can see that there's like a plant looking thing in there with like little roots that's the actual embryo but then the rest of it is just baby formula for that baby peanut plant to grow from you know what i

20:04Hannah Fry:actually think while we get into it i think linnaeus had a had uh he was on the right track of being a bit of a plant perv plants are quite interesting aren't they well yeah i mean look they

20:12Michael Stevens:exist today because of their reproductive abilities and it's really one that's important to them but if we cut all of that out and we say that a vegetable has to be not sexy, we're stuck with other parts of the plants that don't play a role in reproduction, like their roots. OK, so carrots and beets, bulbs like onions, stems. OK, celery seems very vegetably as we dive into this. Leaves, that's great. Lettuce or flower buds like broccoli. But there's something unsatisfying about just using botanical scientific definitions to answer this question.

20:50Hannah Fry:right because the thing is is that while scientists might not agree on what a vegetable is i think all of us can agree and i think all of us would agree that courgettes definitely fit into that category and so what we want to talk about in the second half is about how this interpretation of what this category actually is differs from region to region from culture to culture and also how it's sometimes been legally tested too we'll come to that after the break

21:23Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Project Hail Mary, the new spectacular space adventure movie coming to cinemas from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir, and the directors of the Spider-Verse movies, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. But here's an even better combination, teachers in space.

21:40Hannah Fry:Hello, thank you. Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as science teacher Rylan Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission into space to discover why the sun and the stars are dying. And he teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. What kind of prep would you hope Ryan Gosling had done for this role in order to play the role of a science teacher?

22:07Michael Stevens:He should have spent a bunch of time with cool teenagers and tried to teach things to them so that it wasn't just like a good explanation, but also kept their interest and made them want to hear more and understand it so that they could share it to be cool too.

22:25Hannah Fry:See Project Hail Mary in cinemas and IMAX from Thursday the 19th of March.

22:29Michael Stevens:You can also catch it early on Saturday the 14th of March, which is Pi Day, and Sunday the 15th of March.

22:44Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

22:47Hannah Fry:Radio therapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radio therapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since.

23:00Michael Stevens:Radio therapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from Cancer Research UK's work to make it more precise.

23:10Hannah Fry:Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second, up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy.

23:25Michael Stevens:And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50 % less damage to healthy cells.

23:34Hannah Fry:But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared. So Cancer Research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future.

23:47Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. When you want your spring break to feel like and your kid's pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like, ooh, and room service to feel like, because at Hilton, hospitality feels like, your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for this day.

24:34Hannah Fry:and we're back now we mentioned in the first half the the tomato this is sort of i think this is the one that gets thrown around the tomato is actually a fruit not a vegetable botanically at least this has actually been tested in court so in the 1800s uh just stop me if this story sounds familiar but there was this really interesting thing going on about tariffs that were being imposed internationally into and out of American exports and imports. And the newly created tariff act, there was an import duty on foreign vegetables, but fruit was excluded. And there was this importer who was trying to bring in this ton of West Indian tomatoes to New York.

25:14Hannah Fry:He saw that he had a 10 % tax and was like, well, hang on a second. This is nonsense. Tomatoes are very clearly a fruit. They're very clearly an ovary. There was very clearly seeds involved. Why are you charging me vegetable tax on what is demonstrably fruit. So he took it to court, basically. They ended up at a Supreme Court, no less, for this ruling. And in the end, the court took the side of a customs collector who said, look, I don't care about your botanical stuff. I care about common parlance. And in that sense, tomatoes are vegetables. And the winning argument that turned it was that tomatoes are usually served at dinner with or after the soup, fish or meats, and not at dessert, which is when you would expect fruits to a pit.

26:07Hannah Fry:So we had to pay up. So legally, botanically, tomatoes might be fruits, but legally they are vegetables.

26:15Michael Stevens:Yeah, yeah. Now, that's a pretty convincing reason to call the tomato a vegetable. You know, if we've thought about it really hard and courts have decided that what we feel matters more than the evolution and botanical structures of the fruit, or rather vegetable, then, you know, maybe we need to consider culture more than science. This reminds me of the 2006 lawsuit that was brought by Panera Bread against a restaurant called Qdoba. This happened in Indiana. And the details I don't know everything about, but it's probably a great Wikipedia article to read. Basically, a Panera Bread, which is a restaurant that serves sandwiches, moved into a mall.

27:01Michael Stevens:And part of their contract was that that mall, the owner of the mall, was never going to have another sandwich place move in. And they thought, it's great. We won't have competition. But then the owner allowed a Qdoba to open a location in the mall. Qdoba sells burritos. Now, to a person, a sandwich, a burrito, they're good. They compete with each other for what you want to have for lunch. And Panera noticed this and said, hey, we're going to lose customers to Qdoba. but you said you weren't going to you were not going to have a sandwich shop in the mall so they brought the owner to court and the courts decided hmm no a burrito is not a sandwich so

27:41Hannah Fry:the kidoba can stay yeah okay it's so interesting that it ultimately comes down to money before you can make this distinction there was one we had similar one in the uk with with jaffa cakes i I don't know. I don't know whether. Have you have you ever tried a Jaffa cake?

27:56Michael Stevens:It's like it's like a cakey thing filled with like orange goop.

28:01Hannah Fry:Interestingly, you said cakey thing because you find it in the biscuit aisle or cookie aisle, I should say. It's not crunchy. It's not crunchy, which actually was the ultimate argument that won it, their court case. So this is this is in the 90s. I mean, it's the same story over and over again. essentially. There was a tax to pay, in this case VAT, that you had to pay on biscuits, but you didn't have to pay on cakes. And even though Jaffa Cakes is in the name, they come in a biscuit box. They're the size of biscuits. They're sort of orange jelly inside, exactly as you described. And during the trial, McVitties, who make them, who make Jaffa Cakes, to prove that it was a cake, they made a sort of giant version of a Jaffa Cake to sort of demonstrate that it was spongy.

28:45Hannah Fry:And the winning argument, exactly as you described, came down to this idea that cakes go stale over time, whereas biscuits go soft. And if you leave a Jaffa cake out, it goes stale, goes hard, not soft. So the case we won.

29:01Michael Stevens:Wow. See, I love this kind of stuff. Like, I just love this. Like, we're going to come up with a way to decide what is a cake and what is a cookie legally.

29:10Hannah Fry:But it does come down to the point you made earlier, though, about public opinion, about how we feel about it is the thing that matters. There was, people have actually done this. They've gone out and asked people, what do you think tomatoes are? Do you see them as fruit? Do you see them as vegetables? They discovered that there's just substantial disagreement between people on all kinds of things, by the way, not just tomatoes, but rice, beans, ketchup, grape jelly, whether it's fruits, vegetables or something else. 51 % of people, this is in the US, by the way, classified tomatoes as vegetables, which I think is fair enough.

29:47Hannah Fry:I'd probably put it in that category as well.

29:49Michael Stevens:Only 51 % though. We are really split. You know what? That makes me think that 49 % of the US is just a bunch of little Peabody, like, excuse me, but the tomato is a fruit. I know that. It's not used in culinary practices like you would use a fruit. You don't cut some up and put it on ice cream. The fact that only 51 % of Americans say a tomato is a vegetable seems like it's based on that and not so much on, well, no, everyone knows it's a fruit.

30:18Hannah Fry:Well, 21 % thought that rice was a vegetable. So more for them, we now know it's endosperm. I don't know. It doesn't say here what percentage of people correctly answered it as that.

30:28Michael Stevens:You know what? I would say that it's like a carb. I would put rice in the category with potatoes and bread. I would probably not call it a vegetable. And today I learned that it's actually a fruit scientifically, but it's a weird, beans, rice, they're weird edge cases where you're like, wait a second. I mean, a bean feels like a vegetable to me, but it's a fruit.

30:53Hannah Fry:Or it's just baby formula, baby formula for baby rice, you know?

30:57Michael Stevens:Yeah. It's baby food. It's baby food. It's plant baby food.

31:02Hannah Fry:It's baby food. I'll tell you this, though. This does tell you something about America. Ketchup was labeled as a vegetable by 26 % of respondents. But I do quite like the idea that 47 % of people are saying, yeah, it's fruit. I know the true and correct definition. And yet 26 % of people are saying that ketchup is a vegetable.

31:25Michael Stevens:Right. So you add sugar and salt and vinegar to tomatoes, and the number of people who say it's a vegetable does drop in half. Yes, it does. What do they start saying it is? Do they start saying that, well, now it's a fruit or do they say it's neither?

31:43Hannah Fry:Okay, so ketchup. 26.3 % of people said that they thought ketchup was a vegetable. 10 % of people thought that ketchup was a fruit. 56 % said something else. Okay. And 7 % said, I'm not, I don't know.

31:57Michael Stevens:Now, I think a lot of listeners might be like, oh, my gosh, only Americans would think ketchup is a vegetable. But I think that it is like linguistically and botanically a difficult question. I think when people get upset about results like that, they're upset because they're conflating the word vegetable with healthful. And they're thinking ketchup is not healthy. It's full of sugar and salt. And so you shouldn't call it a vegetable. Only healthy foods that are not fun to eat should be called vegetables. And again, that's part of cultural definitions.

32:32Hannah Fry:I also think if we're being completely fair to people, if the distinction is, does it come from a plant? I mean, ketchup broadly does. Is it served with dessert or main course? And it's your main meal. It's the same argument that the Supreme Court used. I mean, I don't think it's that absurd. I think the other thing that's worth adding is that there was one point when the Reagan administration tried to get ketchup listed as a vegetable in order to save money on the amount of fruit and vegetables that were were given to school children every day. Yeah. So actually, I think that there is maybe I was being tiny bit unfair in the way that I originally presented it.

33:10Hannah Fry:I take back everything I said about Americans.

33:12Michael Stevens:Well, look, it's a difficult question. Like, I did a very non-scientific review of what people have said when asked to name a vegetable. First thing that comes to their mind. And I looked through family feud answers, which kind of they're never I've never found one that was just name a vegetable. It's usually name a vegetable you grow in your garden, which tomato one number one answer. Name a vegetable that kids don't like to eat. Name a vegetable that's not green. But I also looked at Reddit threads because this question, what is the most vegetable vegetable? Hasn't been asked on Reddit before.

33:47Michael Stevens:The oldest one was three years ago. And hands down, broccoli is the number one answer people get.

33:53Hannah Fry:I just don't agree.

33:55Michael Stevens:Number two is carrot. Right. And I'm now thinking I'm going to change my original answer from the beginning of the show to carrot. Because the broccoli is too flowery. It's got florets on it. It's too sexy. The carrot, it's just a root part. It doesn't play a big role in reproduction. And so it, to me, is more vegetable for that reason.

34:17Hannah Fry:There's nothing sexy about a carrot. Michael Stevens 2026.

34:22Michael Stevens:That's... Oh, no. Now all the carrot fans are going to be like, don't shame my love of carrots. Look.

34:30Hannah Fry:Exactly.

34:32Michael Stevens:I wanted to throw in yet another frame we could use to determine vegetableness. And that is to look at what the word vegetable means. The word vegetable today can also mean slow, not moving. Someone who's unconscious could be described as being in a vegetative state. So then I looked into what's the slowest growing plant. Because it, it's flesh, it's roots, they're vegetables. But because they grow so slowly, they're also very vegetable.

35:05Hannah Fry:They don't move.

35:06Michael Stevens:The slowest growing plant that I could find is the creosote bush. This thing grows in really harsh, dry environments. And you should look up David Attenborough's Green Planet clip about this plant because he visited a plant in the 80s and did a whole segment about them. And then he came back like 40 years later and the plant is the same. And they put the two clips together. It's like him, like young David Attenborough, like he's this young strapping man next to a plant. And then they like dissolve and it's old Attenborough next to the same plant. And in those 40 years, it grew less than an inch.

35:51Michael Stevens:In fact, the creosote bush is mainly inactive. It's mainly not growing. It's like not dead, but it only comes to life if it rains, which is, you know, pretty much never. So these things are so slow. I think that if you ate the leaves of a creosote bush, you are eating the most vegetable vegetable. If by the first vegetable, we mean slow.

36:20Hannah Fry:Okay, but can you eat the leaves of that bush?

36:25Michael Stevens:You can put them in your mouth and chew them and swallow them. I don't know what it would do to you. Let's look it up. Creosote bush edible? Question mark?

36:37Hannah Fry:Hey, you can make tea. That's not eating. That doesn't count. I'm sorry.

36:41Michael Stevens:Apparently the tea is so bitter, its consumption is not very popular.

36:49Hannah Fry:So far, you've got this and cinnamon. I mean, forgive me if I pass up on an opportunity to come around for dinner at your house.

36:58Michael Stevens:Flower petals. Creosote flower petals are okay to use in a salad. And I love that it's the petal because the petal is not part of what winds up becoming a fruit or anything.

37:09Hannah Fry:It's adjacent to the sexual parts, though.

37:13Michael Stevens:Apparently, creosote bush in large quantities is poisonous to livestock. So maybe edibleness is going to fail it.

37:22Hannah Fry:Should also add, actually, that the leaves of the creosote bush of mammals, only the jackrabbit will eat them. And then only when it can find no other food as the leaves are so bitter and horrible. Desert iguanas do eat it, though.

37:36Michael Stevens:Okay.

37:36Hannah Fry:So, you know.

37:37Michael Stevens:I do, however, feel like we should focus on what's edible to a human. In which case, let me move on to a slightly faster growing plant that's still amazingly slow, the saguaro cactus. This thing, okay, when it starts growing, I couldn't believe this. After its first two years of life, it's only about six and a half millimeters tall, like a quarter inch tall. You see in like the Wile E. Coyote cartoons, these cactuses with the arms. Saguarro cactuses don't really usually grow arms until they're at least 100 years old. They grow at such a slow rate and they flower only once they're 35 years old.

38:19Michael Stevens:And you can eat saguaro cactus. Okay, there's a Southwest Foraging Facebook group where they say that the fruit is great. You can make syrup out of saguaro fruit, but the flesh is not edible. It has minimal uses other than drying it out and breaking it up for mulch. Shoot. Okay, so I'm not finding good slow vegetables.

38:41Hannah Fry:You're not doing good here. Well, hold on. Olive trees last, you know, many thousands of years if they're lucky enough. There's one in Crete, which I think is 4 ,000 years old, are the reports of it. I got to go meet it. It was incredible. Extremely slow growing. They have a tradition in Crete that when you are born, your family will plant an olive tree in your honour. And by the time you get to adulthood, it's basically like a stick still, even when you get to adulthood. And they don't really start looking like proper olive trees until they're a thousand years old.

39:18Michael Stevens:Oh, wow. Okay. So, but obviously olives, olives are too fruity.

39:24Hannah Fry:Too fruity. And olive oil, too fruity.

39:27Michael Stevens:They are a seed. They come from an ovary. But the leaves, the leaves of the olive plant, of the olive tree can be eaten. So that's feeling to me very vegetably and slow. So it's, it's a vegetable botanically. it's also a vegetable in the meaning of being really slow growing.

39:47Hannah Fry:My question is how many people, when you initially asked the question, how many people wrote olive leaves?

39:53Michael Stevens:I'm going to guess none.

39:55Hannah Fry:I'm going to guess none too. I think stepping aside from the vegetable thing for a moment, there is this bigger question around this, which is the way that we choose to categorize things. And I think the way that the categories that we agree on end up changing our experience of reality. There's a few different examples of this that I could go into, but I think one of my favourites is about colours. So every language has different words for colour. In English, there's 11 words. Some languages only have two or three, you know, two, three or four colour words. And what is interesting is that the colour words that come first are always black and white followed by red right now this is the reason why in homer they talk about the the sea being wine red and it's because they didn't yet have a a word for blue they hadn't yet categorized the world around them with language sufficiently that they recognized that blue was uh distinct from red say the thing is is that in english i know we're recording this in English, but there are other languages that have more colours than we do.

41:07Hannah Fry:In Russian, for example, they have a word for light blue and a word for dark blue. So I think that the word for light blue is galboy. And it's distinct. I mean, we don't, it's sort of like pink, effectively like pink, but for blue. Now, the thing is, you could just say, oh, well, this is very interesting. They've just got different words, different categories, essentially. But actually, there is some evidence that it changes the way that people actually experience color when they have a richer set of categories in order to distinguish between them. One particularly famous experiment in the 60s was where they arranged colors in a triangle and they got English speakers, they got Russian speakers, they got people from around the world to try and match the shade at the top with the one that it was closest to in the bottom and it turned out that Russian speakers were faster when those shades at the top matched with their their language boundaries when one was light and one was dark while the English speakers basically showed no difference if it was blue it's blue it's blue it doesn't matter there's no there's no difference but I think what's interesting about this it's not saying are Russian speakers better than English speakers at matching shades of blue instead it's it's suggesting that having separate words actually helps people distinguish things more quickly.

42:35Hannah Fry:But the language categories can actually influence how we perceive differences in the world and our processing speed.

42:41Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah. I mean, I definitely think our relationship to the tomato has been affected, at least in some small part, by the debate over what word we should use. And when you have words for things, you've put a handle on an otherwise kind of chaotic part of reality and now you can manipulate it and you can think about it and you can control it in ways that you couldn't otherwise. I think about this mathematically all the time. Here's an exercise. What's 300 times 20? 6 ,000. 6 ,000, right? Like it's not that difficult. It doesn't even look difficult. But if I asked you, what is 1 ,220 times 32?

43:22Michael Stevens:I would have a mild panic. You'd say, oh, geez, all right, let me get some paper out or let me think about it would take longer. However, that is the exact same math problem as 300 times 20. I just converted to base six. The way we choose what base our numeral system is in affects what kinds of problems are easy and which kind of problems are hard for us just because of the words.

43:44Hannah Fry:And just to just to really clarify that, I mean, we use a base 10 counting system largely because we have 10 fingers. It makes it extremely easy. So our digits go from 0 to 9 and then we're like, what? Run out of digits? We'll just put a 1 there and go to the next one, right? And so on and so on. But there are ways, if you think about a clock, you don't move on to the next half day until you have completed a round of 12 rather than 10. And there is no real reason apart from our fingers why we should be living in base 10. We could easily have another squiggle for the number 10, another squiggle for the number 11, and then one zero could actually denote 12.

44:21Hannah Fry:And then all of a sudden, exactly as you describe, some maths problems would be way, way harder, but other ones would be easier.

44:28Michael Stevens:Okay, that was cool. It was so much better than the three hour long discussion of bases we did last time.

44:37Hannah Fry:Well, I don't know. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I agree. But this is coming down to the same idea. it's that you have this world that you exist in and in order to make sense of it in order to make it legible it's necessary to cut it up and categorize it in a way that you can grab hold of and the categories that you choose the the way that you distinguish between things ends up changing not just your experience of it but also what you can go on to do with it i mean why can't we have tomatoes with dessert?

45:12Michael Stevens:Well, exactly. I mean, I've had chocolate with my main course. I've had chocolate with chicken because of course the cacao bean is not sweet right off the plant. We add the sugar. You can take the, um, the cocoa powder and make beautiful savory sauces out of it. Is that being an ovary? I'm eating an ovary, aren't I?

45:31Hannah Fry:You're having fruit for main course, my friend.

45:34Michael Stevens:Golly. You're all over the place. I'm all over the place. I'm just like, hey, if it has to do with plant sex, put it in my mouth.

45:44Hannah Fry:Michael Stevens, 2026. Okay, then. So what can we agree on then? We agree that vegetable is not a botanical construct. It's not even really a cultural one. It's maybe a linguistic shorthand, but one that doesn't have hard boundaries.

46:01Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah, I think that the most vegetable vegetable is the platonic ideal that exists in our minds. It's made up by people. This reminds me of when I interviewed Jack Horner, the paleontologist who informed the Jurassic Park movies. And I thought, oh, I'm going to finally figure out the answer to this question. I was like, Jack, is the hyena a cat or a dog? Because they, hyenas, have some cat characteristics, some cat behaviors, but they also have some dog behaviors. And he goes, we made those terms up. There are no cats and dogs. and I've been like, oh my gosh, you're right. The hyena just is what it is.

46:43Michael Stevens:This also reminds me of a question that vets apparently get asked a lot, veterinarians. A lot of dog owners go, hey, does my dog know that I'm a human or does it just think that I'm a weird kind of dog? And that's a great way to keep in mind that these categories were invented by us. There's stuff in the universe with properties. and we kind of have to make that reality take the shape that we want.

47:13Hannah Fry:Yeah, we absolutely do. We absolutely do.

47:17Michael Stevens:Are we in a position to give an award? Like, given everything that we've concluded, what is the most vegetable vegetable?

47:26Hannah Fry:So what have we gone through? We've got the emotional heart, the emotional reaction, the moral obligation. We've got the non-sexiest part.

47:35Michael Stevens:Yep, which is like the botanical definition.

47:37Hannah Fry:We've got the ethical part. We've got the slowest growing part.

47:41Michael Stevens:We've got the cultural vibes. Expectation. Annoyingly, the word vegetable, it actually used to mean basically the opposite of what it means today. It used to mean capable of life, vigor. Literally, vigor and vegetable come from the same source. So, vegetable used to mean living things as opposed to rocks. So, I mean, you could even say that like the very first vegetables were the stromatolite, you know, fossils that we found from billions of years ago. Yes, I just threw yet another complication into the pot. The most vegetable vegetable, like I think I'm still I'm still going to say carrot. I think that it's not sexy.

48:24Michael Stevens:It's a common, you know?

48:26Hannah Fry:Yeah, I just I just don't have it in my heart to agree with you. I just don't have it in my heart to agree with you.

48:31Michael Stevens:So what are you still on the potato kick? Are you still thinking overcooked Brussels sprout?

48:37Hannah Fry:What I will say is this. Basically, I want a reason to say potato.

48:40Michael Stevens:I think potato is really justifiable because it's also rooty and plain. So it fits a lot of the vibe definitions. It fits the botanical ones. I just don't know if a lot of people are going to say potato when asked to name 10 vegetables. Is potato going to be in the first three?

49:00Hannah Fry:Look, here's my reason for going for potato. I just can't, I can't find it in my heart to agree with you about carrot. I think it's got too much human intervention. I think it's, you know, orange for the purposes of making it look all fancy. I'm just not impressed by it. You know, I'm sticking with the potato and here's the reason why. There is no other boring edible part of a plant that can do so much on a plate. You can have chips, you can have, you know, boiled spuds, you can have mashed potatoes, you can have croquettes, you can have dauphinoise. It's the Irish mixed grill. You can have any of those things.

49:34Hannah Fry:And I think it is the only vegetable that I would happily live on exclusively for the rest of my life. And that is why it's an emotional argument, I'll admit, but that is why I'm sticking with potato as the best. And also, sorry, thank you very much, Amy, our producer, not very sexy. There is nothing less sexy than a potato.

49:54Michael Stevens:That is a really convincing argument, Hannah. Because it's even making me think I might change my mind because carrots are kind of sweet. They've got a lot of sugar in them. If you've ever just boiled a carrot down or drank carrot juice, it's like a smoothie, a sugary smoothie. But the potato... Potato juice is disgusting. It doesn't have any lofty ambitions to be fruity in nature. It's just there. And you're right. It can be prepared in so many ways. It really takes advantage of the edibleness that we're requiring from the most vegetable vegetable. So potatoes, man, they might just deserve.

50:35Hannah Fry:Look, the Irish were onto something. The Irish absolutely knew what they were doing. And that's our, I guess, our Oscar, as it were. Our final prize goes to the potato. Cheers to the potatoes. Cheers to the potato. And I'm sure everybody watching completely agrees.

50:50Michael Stevens:I'm sure. And if you don't, let us know. Please reach out to us and be angry and immature or not. I'd prefer if you weren't. I'd prefer if you sent us in other questions. We might answer your questions on a future episode of Field Notes. Send those to therestisscience at goalhanger.com.

51:07Hannah Fry:And that is it for this episode. Make sure you're following us wherever you get your podcasts. And we will see you on Thursday for another episode of Field Notes and on Tuesday again for our main episode. Until then.

51:18Michael Stevens:See you guys then. Bye-bye.

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