National Vegetarian Week
National Vegetarian Week began on Monday (10th May) and gives a chance to consider the vast number of plant-based food choices available as well as the benefits a well-balanced diet may provide.
It’s also a chance to chew over the age-old question of what is the difference between a fruit and a vegetable?
Well to botanical boffins a fruit is a vegetable. It’s the edible portion of the plant that develops from a flower and contains seeds – for example apples, cucumbers, and strawberries.
Other sub-sets of vegetables cover the other edible portion of plants such as leaves (lettuce), stems (asparagus), bulbs (onions/garlic), flower (broccoli/cauliflower), seeds (peas) and roots and tubers (carrots and potatoes).
According to fruitsandveggies.org confusion can arise due to some grocers and chefs going against the scientific grain and insisting the likes of pumpkins sit removed from the fruit section because of their savoury rather than sweet taste.
That’s unlikely to get them kicked out of any vegetarian society, the first of which was founded in the UK in 1847 though records of plant-based lifestyles in India date back nearly 3,000 years.
If religious or ethical reasons were behind the first moves to vegetarianism more recent times have seen health and environmental concerns raised as reasons to promote a more plant-based diet.
Fruit or vegetable, the range of plant-based options is, if not quite endless, certainly extensive.
In fact, if you decided to eat a different vegetable every day it would take over three years before you went hungry.
A study by Bioversity International revealed there are 1,097 different varieties of cultivated vegetables (including 90 in the fruits and seeds sub-set) that grow across the world, with quality of soil and farming methods key to their sustainability.
At Zorba, we offer a wide range of vegetarian choices so, whether it’s the avocado in our guacamole, the tomato in our Tex-Mex salsa or the coconut in our vegan katsu curry, our robust supplier assurance programme and worldwide audit programme of suppliers means we can track our ingredients from field to factory.
