The Vegetable Illusion

There is no such thing as a vegetable.

It is a word born not of nature, but of comfort — a label to calm our fear of the undivided world. In the design of life, there are only stems, leaves, seeds, and fruit. Nature draws no moral line between them. We did.

Needing order, humanity built one. We named the sweet things fruit — the reward, the pleasure — and the plain, the bitter, the necessary — vegetables. It was not a system of botany, but of belief. An architecture of appetite and guilt.

Still, the fiction took root. Laws were written by it. Markets organized around it. Children were raised to obey it — to eat what did not exist. And so, through repetition, illusion became civilization.

The tomato, a fruit by biology, was condemned as a vegetable by law. The carrot, a root, was enlisted into virtue. The world beneath our plates became moral theater — a taxonomy of control.

But the earth never spoke the word vegetable.

The fields do not recognize our categories.

They grow, indifferent to our naming, faithful only to sunlight and decay.

We wanted truth. We found order.

We wanted knowledge. We found words.

And we mistook the map for the territory.

In every act of classification, there is a quiet tragedy — the loss of what never needed to be divided.

[STATIC RISES]

SUBJECT: Human Taxonomy Failure

VERDICT: Persistent Misclassification

TRANSMISSION TERMINATED