Why do we usually cook vegetables, and eat fruit raw?

How do you know that vegetables are cooked more frequently than fruits?

Which vegetables and which fruit do you mean?

@gondwanalon Just from personal experience. Just wondering. Just from fruits, and vegetables from Canada.

Other than tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers, I don’t have any ideas, off the top of my head, for fruit that is cooked.

Some people are raw vegans, and I am curious?

I need help finding vegetables to shop for and eat? As my ibs and medicine prevents me from eating a large swath of foods.

Not me. I cook both veggies and fruit. I also eat them both raw.

Vegetables are more often cooked, because they become more palatable, whereas fruit become worse after cooking.

I think in some cases it’s a matter or chewability. A carrot can be eaten raw, but if you cook it, it becomes softer and easier to chew. Ditto that with potatoes. Some things can be added to dishes raw but typically they are sliced very thinly (radishes for example) so that it is easier to chew.

Many fruits pass the softness test easily enough. Something like a pear or an apple are more firm, but really aren’t of a texture that is difficult to bite into or chew. Bananas, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, etc are all easily chewed. You CAN cook vegetables and it will really bring out out some of the sugars in them, but it almost gets too soft at that point. But you see that in fruit pies all the time.

@RedDeerGuy1 Besides the fruits that you mentioned, here’s some fruits that are also routinely cooked:
Beans, peas, corn, peanuts, apples, cherries, sunflower seeds, pistachio nuts, almonds. Oh and pineapple on pizza pie. HA!

@gondwanalon Don’t forget tomatoes!

In addition to the already-mentioned legumes, corn, and tomatoes, these fruits are sometimes, usually, or always cooked:

Peppers
Zucchini and other types of squash
Eggplant
Green and yellow beans
Pumpkins (classified as a pepo, which is a fun word to know)
Gourds
Okra
Coffee
Chocolate

Also, when you cook things, you can combine them in a pleasing way and season them. If you combine a bunch of raw vegetables, what you have is a salad. Great, but it’s never going to be a lasagne or a shepherd’s pie, never mind a hearty pot of soup.

Being somewhat tongue in cheek here, but vegetables need all the help they can get whereas fruit is always delicious!

@LifeQuestioner Tongue-in-cheek, but not wrong. Some veggies are really not that good to me whereas I have a hard time finding a fruit I don’t like.

What distinguishes fruits from vegetables? To a scientist the fruit of a plant is the part that carries the seeds.

I mean, if you want to get technical, there actually is no such thing as a vegetable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8mcTIEVKUU

The part of a plant that grows vegetatively (without sexual parts or directly derived sexuality) is a vegetable. Roots, tubers, stems and leaves can correctly be called “vegetables”.

That would include carrots, potatoes, spinach, celery and not much else. See @ragingloli ’ s video

@LostInParadise Don’t forget lettuce leaves, cabbage leaves, bok choy stalks and leaves,gaylon stalks and leaves, broccoli stocks, asparagus stalks rhubarb stalks, radishes, rutabagas, turnips and beets.