The Toronto Star's 10 Things We Learned This Week

Some of the things we learned this week, according to the Toronto Star's weekly feature "10 Things We Learned This Week" includes:

Although technically a fruit, the tomato was deemed a vegetable in 1893 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which reasoned that because it's used more like a vegetable than a fruit, it should therefore have the former designation. The ruling was prompted by a legal challenge involving a tax on imported vegetables.


Botanically speaking, grains of wheat, corn and rice, as well as squash, peppers and eggplant, are all fruit – fleshy or dry ripened ovaries of plants, containing seeds. Vegetables, meanwhile, are the edible leaves, stalks, roots, tubers, bulbs and flowers of a plant.


Ketchup started out as a pickled fish sauce, ke-tsiap, in China, before being adopted by Malaysia (kechap) and Indonesia (ketjap). The British made it with pickled mushrooms, anchovies, walnuts and oysters, with tomatoes entering the brew in the 1700s.

Read the Toronto Star Story

http://www.thestar.com/article/475515