Vegetable
Vegetable_market.jpg
- For other uses, see Vegetable (disambiguation).
Vegetable is a nutritional and culinary term denoting any part of a plant that is commonly consumed by humans as food, but is not regarded as a culinary fruit, nut, herb, spice, or grain.
These include leaf vegetables (e.g. lettuce), stem vegetables (asparagus), root vegetables (carrot) and flower vegetables (broccoli), and botanical fruits such as green beans, cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, tomatoes, avocadoes, capsicums, et cetera, as well as fleshy, immature seeds such as those of maize, peas or beans.
In general, vegetables are thought of as being eaten in the main course, not as dessert or breakfast (with some exceptions, such as rhubarb).
Commercial production of vegetables is a branch of horticulture called olericulture.
Vegetable is also used as a literary term for any plant: vegetable matter, vegetable kingdom.