But the people calling this product “plant-based” aren’t living in Aristotle’s time or even in the early 20th century. They’re living in an age where most everyone with a basic education knows that plants ≠ fungi.
Fine Mycelium™ is the first biomaterial that matches the strength, hand feel and durability of cowhide—the gold standard for leather.
That is a pretty big claim. Can you make saddles out of it? Boat and car seats? Carriage suspensions? (The latter is probably not needed anymore, but it’s one of the most demanding uses for leather I can imagine)
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Plant based.
Made from fungi.
You se the mistake here, right?
You see the rest of the thread, right?
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Yep, you didn’t bother to read the other 20-ish posts before yours. 
Sure, though the mushrooms are in the part of the produce section labeled “vegetables” which is generally defined in reference to plants (as is the other part of the produce section, but that’s neither here nor there). The word “plant,” like most words, admits multiple related meanings. Some of these are lay, and some of them are technical. The lay meaning of “plant” clearly includes fungi (as did the scientific definition, once). Note that the OED still attests both senses without marking the broader sense as obsolete, informal, or otherwise – just “general”:
This doesn’t make the “general” sense provided here wrong. It is completely okay for a lay definition and a technical definition (or two related but distinct technical definitions) to diverge in meaning. Language is pragmatic. What the word “plant” means is defined by how it’s used in practice. And in practice, in non-technical contexts, the term “plant” is often inclusive of fungi – q.v. the very article we’re discussing.
The scientific definition of “plant” is, of course, better for the uses science puts it to, i.e. descriptive classification of biological relations, facilitation of formal knowledge discovery, etc. But it is not intrinsically more correct or intrinsically better than any other definition. To demand a technical definition outside of its context just denies the reality of how language works.
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You know it! Unfortunately it’s harder to make a search trigger for category debates than it is to make one for “11-foot-8”.
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The berry comic raises a good point that I haven’t seen raised in this thread. Rigorously categorizing berries in a general context could lead to confusion, since the technical and lay definitions are very different.
I don’t see the potential for the same sort of confusion by categorizing fungi as distinct from plants. Doing so doesn’t change the mix of items in the categories, it just establishes that what was considered one category is now considered two.
If the two choices are equally harmless and one is correct in more circumstances, I’d choose the option that is more often correct. For me, continuing to call fungus plants would be rejecting science in favor of tradition.
That’s an odd choice in an article praising a scientific advancement. Of course it’s really marketing and they’re probably trying to appeal to people that think “mushrooms are gross.” Again, doesn’t seem like a great reason to reject the science to me.
Edit: immediately on submitting, I realized I just attempted to categorize categorization problems, so maybe just ignore me
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@wazroth would need to make a bingo hypercube
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The thing with lay definitions is that they are rarely rigidly fixed, and the nuance in meaning is often directly suggested by context. If I say something like, “I took a bunch of photos of plants in the woods, here are some pictures” and there were mushrooms among the pictures, it would not be reasonable to raise an objection to the use of “plants” in this case. But if someone said “I’m setting up my specimen garden, and I’m growing six new plants and four new fungi” then the exclusion of fungi from this use of plant is contextually obvious. Both of these are informal uses (as presented), and both are correct.
(There are also technical examples of this: when a herpetologist says “turtles” do they mean to exclude tortoises, or are they referring to all chelonians? It depends. (Also, what does a soil scientist mean when they say “sand”?))
Hoo boy.
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I was WAY too old when I finally thought in any conscious way “wait, if eggs are dairy, what the fuck does dairy mean?” Like, I-was-born-in-'81-and-clarified-the-answer-on-the-internet old. Insult to injury, my grandparents (somewhat estranged…) are dairy farmers.
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Ooooh I love the lower-left corner!
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To tell the truth, I was seriously scraping for entries.
…Ooh, I gotta get Lakoff and Aristotle off of the same row.
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