VEGETABLE? FRUIT? OR SOMETHING ELSE?

How do you define that astonishingly diverse, nutritious and colourful group of foods that we call vegetables? And which ones make the grade for preservation in genebanks?

Vegetables are generally defined as the edible part of a plant – the leaves (lettuce, spinach), stem (celery, asparagus), roots (carrot, parsnip), tubers (potato, yam) or flower heads (broccoli, cauliflower) – while fruits are formed from the ovary of a flowering plant and contain seeds. This is where it gets tricky; with this classification, squash, tomatoes, capsicum and eggplants are fruit. Conversely, sweet melons are classified as vegetables. Botanically, there’s no clear-cut definition.

Instead, veggies are usually defined by their cultural and culinary uses, although this isn’t straightforward either – for instance, papaya and mangoes can be eaten as vegetables while young, or as fruit when they become ripe, while mungbeans might be eaten as sprouts (vegetables) or as grains.

“Arriving at an indisputable, unassailable definition of vegetables is virtually impossible,” write Worldveg scientists Narinder Dhillon and Pepijn Schreinemachers. They tentatively suggest vegetables are “mostly herbaceous annual plants of which some portion is eaten, either cooked or raw, during the principal part of the meal to complement starchy food and other food items.”

So which seeds are considered worth saving? Worldveg collects seeds with social and economic importance. This might include global crops such as tomato, pepper and pumpkin, or vegetables popular with local markets and diets: jute mallow in west Africa, yardlong bean in Southeast Asia.

They also consider nutritional value, genetic relatedness to crops, and complementing other genebanks. But their focus is conserving intraspecific crop diversity.

“We are not interested in conserving tomato,” says van Zonneveld. “We are interested in conserving 8,000 varieties of tomato because this offers a gene pool for tomato breeding.” Each variety has been created by humans in different contexts, but many no longer exist in farmers’ fields, he adds.

For added breeding diversity, Worldveg also conserves wild crop relatives.