(Honestly, in my quest to eat more vegetables, when I can't figure out is something even qualifies as a vegetable, it makes me want to give up.)

And this is a major part of my issue with these sorts of classifications. Any definition of "vegetable" that's anything other than "food that grows as a plant" will, by necessity, be at least somewhat arbitrary.

Corn is a vegetable, fuck that noise. Corn, potatoes, carrots, all vegetables. What else would they be?

Chocolate is a vegetable.

Pffle to your friends, Tep. Corn and carrots are totally vegetable. They're not greens, and they contain more carbs/starches than, say, kale, but they're still vegetables, and better for you than potato chips.

Awww yeah, back to Corn Nuts!

I know green veggies are highly promoted, and since edamame is green and comes out of a pod, I thought it might be considered a veggie. But then -- definitely not a steak, but protein-y; certainly not broccoli, but veggie-like. Hence my confusion.

I should embrace its multitudes, but I want my food categories to be simple. Corn Nuts, chocolate, wine.

Corn is a vegetable, fuck that noise. Corn, potatoes, carrots, all vegetables. What else would they be?

Plenty of diet plans and lists of food groups classify them as "starches" or "carbs." Which makes no sense at all, because carbs are things that foods contain, not categories of foods, but it's been around and confusing people for close to a century now.

Corn is a vegetable, fuck that noise. Corn, potatoes, carrots, all vegetables. What else would they be?

Plenty of diet plans and lists of food groups classify them as "starches" or "carbs."

Hence my confusion.

Huh. Well, if you want to do that you're gonna have to pick a diet plan that does that and follow what it says, I guess. There isn't an underlying truth that will guide you.

I collect vintage cookbooks, and the number of different ways we've found over the years to make categories of foods and list how much of each category we should eat is really astounding. There was a while around the early 1900s when "digestibility" was the key thing -- everything would warn you to never eat whole grains, and always cook vegetables until they're mushy, because eating anything with fiber would over-tax your digestive system and leave you weak and tired, because all your energy would have been used up in digesting your food. (Not surprisingly, magazines from that same period had a ton of ads for laxatives.)

Huh. Well, if you want to do that you're gonna have to pick a diet plan that does that and follow what it says, I guess. There isn't an underlying truth that will guide you.

I know, dang it. I think what I'm hanging on to (other than Facebook lady's pronouncements) is from way back in my Weight Watchers days, when they were really clear that "starchy vegetables" (mostly corn and potatoes, IIRC) were bad, but "non-starchy vegetables" (more or less everything else, including carrots), were okay. But I disremember where various bean types fell into categories.

I googled, and Mayo Clinic says edamame is a vegetable. So, boom. Done. (There is no website called isitavegetable. com. I checked.)

I just pulled out a vegetarian cook book from 1910. There's a long section on nutrition at the back. It says:

In the accompanying tables of food values, ..., the nutritive food elements are classified under four heads: protein, or that which builds muscle and other tissue; fat and carbohydrates, which supply heat and energy; and the ash, or mineral, which contains elements needed to repair bones and nerves. Gluten, found principally in wheat; albumen, in eggs and meat; casein, in milk; fibrin, in flesh; and legumin, in legumes, are proteins. According to scientific research, it has been found that to nourish the body properly it must be supplied with about five times as much of the carbohydrates as of the protein.

This is a matter all should understand, for thus much inconvenience may be avoided.

The table then lists a bunch of foods, with the amount of Refuse (I think that's fiber), Water, Protein, Fat, Carbohydrates, Ash, and "Total Nutritive Value" in each.