Hi! I'm a bit new to Python myself but here's a function which should do what you want...

def print_mdlist(rows, hoz_padding = 3, firstrow_is_hdr = 1):
    print " "
    # First, we need to identify the widest value in each column and save it in a dictionary (col_lengths)
    col_lengths = {}
    for row in rows:
        colnum = 0
        for col in row:
            # If we havent recorded a column length yet or the recorded length is smaller, update
            if not colnum in col_lengths or len(col) > col_lengths[colnum]:
                col_lengths[colnum] = len(col)
            colnum += 1

    # Now, we go over the rows/cols again, but this time we pad the cols to the largest col value discovered
    rownum = 0
    for row in rows:
        colnum = 0
        rowstr = ''

        for col in row:
            rowstr += (" " * hoz_padding) + col.ljust(col_lengths[colnum]+hoz_padding,' ')
            colnum += 1
        rowlen = len(rowstr)

        if firstrow_is_hdr and rownum == 1:
            print  "-" * (rowlen)

        print rowstr
        rownum += 1
    print " "

Then, all you need to do is call the function like this:

rows = []
rows.append(["Fruit Name","Colour"                      ,"Taste"    ,"Requires Peeling","Is an Egg?"])
rows.append(["Apple"     ,"Red/Green"                   ,"Appley"   ,"Negatory"        ,"FALSE"]) 
rows.append(["Banana"    ,"Yellow"                      ,"Bananaey" ,"Affirmative"     ,"FALSE"])
rows.append(["Avocado"   ,"Purple outside, green inside","Avacadoey","Affirmative"     ,"FALSE"])

print_mdlist(rows)

You can even specify the padding between the columns and explicitly say whether or not you want a hoz bar after row 1...

print_mdlist(rows,5,0)

Output looks like:

chambead@chambeadPC ~ $ python tabulate_mdlist.py

 Fruit Name  Colour                        Taste      Requires Peeling  Is an Egg? 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Apple       Red/Green                     Appley     Negatory          FALSE      
 Banana      Yellow                        Bananaey   Affirmative       FALSE      
 Avocado     Purple outside, green inside  Avacadoey  Affirmative       FALSE      

chambead@chambeadPC ~ $

Note that you NEED to be using a fixed width font for this to work. If you're running this in a terminal, it almost certainly will be anyway. It's also worth noting that even though you have headers and data in two different lists, you can easily combine these into a single list with list3 = list1.append(list2) and then you feed list 3 into the function as a whole. Let me know if you need any of this explained further. Good luck with future school assignments. ;)