Everyone knows what a vegetable is – or do they? Vegetable is one of those everyday words that means something different depending on who you are, and what you are saying.

Actually, in Tudor times, people used the word vegetable very differently from us. They used it to mean a plant of any kind, just as scientists still do. To a scientist a vegetable is any plant, and vegetation is a word that simply means ‘a collection of plants of any kind'. So scientists would say that the natural vegetation (group of plants) of Britain is woodland, for example.

But by the 18th century, the word vegetable began to take on a new meaning and came to refer to the non-sweet (or sour) fleshy part of a plant you can eat.

So what is a vegetable to us today? Going to a supermarket helps. You will see vegetables you don’t cook. They are called salad plants. Then you will find vegetables you mostly use cooked, such as carrots and potatoes. And quite separately you will find fruits, because fruits are sweet or sour parts of a plant, and so are not vegetables.

Most vegetables are plants that grow from seed each year and which have stems, leaves, seeds or roots that we can eat. They are not woody plants like apples, they are not sweet like strawberries and we do not grow them to process their seeds, like wheat. But, at the end of the day, there is no hard and fast rule.