Rachel and. Marc Parent, of Ottawa, Ont,, for their question;

Is the avocado a fruit or a vegetable?

When we sit down to the table, we think of vegetables as a dinner course. A complete dinner includes meat, potatoes, salad, a vegetable and a dessert. The vegetable course is usually something green or yellowish ‑ spinach, squash beans or peas. But there are other meanings for the word vegetable, several different meanings. The word fruit also has more than one meaning. When we think of dinner courses, we think of fruit as part of the dessert or salad course. It is these different word meanings that lead to confusion about fruit and vegetables.

The botanist thinks of a fruit as a package bearing a seed or group of seeds. Tomatoes, apples, avocados, cherries and even nuts are packages of food made by the plant to support the little seeds inside. So, as far as the botanist and the plant are concerned, the avocado is a fruit.

However, when we are planning dinner courses, we have to think of the avocado in another way. Vie can list it as a vegetable or as a salad. This is quite all right if, in the back of our minds, we remember in nature class at school that the avocado is the seed bearing fruit of the avocado tree.