On Food and Cooking

These fruits are the natural world’s soft drinks
and candies, flashily packaged in bright
colors, and test-marketed through millions of
years of natural selection. They tend to have a
high sugar content, to satisfy the innate liking
for sweetness shared by all animals. They
have a pronounced and complex aroma, which
may involve several hundred different
chemicals, far more than any other natural
ingredient. And they soften themselves to an
appealingly tender, moist consistency. By
contrast, the plant foods that we treat as
vegetables remain firm, have either a very
mild flavor — green beans and potatoes — or
else an excessively strong one — onions and
cabbage — and therefore require the craft of
the cook to make them palatable.
The very words fruit and vegetable reflect
these differences. Vegetable comes from the
Latin verb vegere, meaning to invigorate or
enliven. Fruit, on the other hand, comes from
Latin fructus, whose cluster of related