Is Lemon A Fruit Or A Vegetable?

Within botany a fruit is described as a flowering plant that is derived from specific tissues of the flowers, most commonly one or more ovaries. Fruits are the way that plants disseminate seeds. If a plant produces edible and attractive fruits, these seed bearing fruits can be eaten by animals and then excreted elsewhere. 

This is an easy way for plants to carry out seed dispersal. The description of a fruit is comparable to that of a vegetable. A vegetable is defined as an edible plant or part of plant that is not a fruit or a seed. A vegetable is typically the leaf, stem or root of a plant. Most descriptions of vegetables are culinary and cultural rather than scientific.

The lemon is an oval yellow fruit that is used both for culinary and non culinary purposes. The juice is the most common aspect of it to be used, although the zest and pulp may be used in cooking and baking. 

Lemon flavoring is commonly used in drinks and sweets, while the sour taste of lemon is found in a variety of culinary dishes across the world. As lemon juice is between five and six per cent citric acid, it makes a cheap alternative for educational scientific experiments. 

Lemon is also used in a number of aromatherapy and fragranced products and has a popular household use for cleaning and removing stains. Before the development of fermentation based processes, lemon was the primary resource for citric acid.

The fruit lemon comes in a number of varieties across the globe and is used extensively both in culinary and non culinary environments.