Is the Tomato a Fruit or a Vegetable?:  Food for Thought

Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?  This is an age old question.  It ranks right there with the best of them:  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? And now…Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

Yesterday and today, my class had the wonderful opportunity to Skype live with two plant scientists from NC State University to gain research about the tomato plants that they are about to grow.  Among the many great questions they asked pertaining to tomato resources, types of cultivars, and rate of germination, one of them was:  Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?  I was both glad and worried that my young scientists had asked this.  Glad, because I wanted to know, but also worried that it would not be a vegetable and I would feel terrible having gulped down tomatoes in my youth and feeling like I had, in my mother’s voice, “not eaten my vegetables.”

So, when the question was posed, Ms. Swift chuckled a bit and gave one of the best answers that I have ever heard.  “A tomato is technically a fruit,” she said.  “It has seeds.  Any plant that reproduces using seeds is a fruit.  So in the science world, we call it a fruit,” she explained.  “However, culturally it is considered a vegetable.”  Then I heard a student whisper, “It’s both.” Then he did an “air fist clutch”.

Later, after the presentation had ended, I thought about how crucial language is.  It’s just not fair to include tomatoes in the “fruit” category.  After all, apples, oranges, pineapples, and bananas occupy that space, right?  Further, the language mavens have neatly grouped potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, and tomatoes into the vegetable category.  We have always referred to tomatoes as vegetables and that is that.

I sort of chuckled and thought that maybe this could be the source of a great etymology lesson.  After all, it is not very often that I get opportunities to teach linguistics and the sort.

I quickly said, “Class, are butterflies flies?” “Do they have anything to do with butter?”  A couple of students looked puzzled, then responded hesitantly, “No.”  “What about pineapples?” I continued.  “Are they apples?” “Of course not, but we call them such because that is the name we associate with them.”  “Maybe the first person that ever saw these things gave them these curious sounding names, but now that we know more because of science, we realize that the names for pineapples and butterflies don’t have anything to do with their species”. I went on to explain to them that just like tomatoes are scientifically a fruit, we have named them vegetables.  Perhaps it goes back to how they were prepared.  Maybe because many recipes called for them in soups, stews, sauces, and salads, like other vegetables such as greens, mushrooms, and beans, people began to call them vegetables and the name stuck.  Fruits, on the other hand are enjoyed alone as a snack.  Can you imagine biting into a tomato as an after lunch snack? This is much more closely associated with an apple, an orange, or even a pear.

By now, most of the students were nodding in agreement.  I wanted to bring the conversation back around to something more practical.  I asked them to think about some words and expressions that we use everyday such as:  web, net, and hang-up the phone.  These words all began meaning something else, but the way they are used today has changed.  This is similar to what has happened with tomatoes being actually being a fruit, but referred to as a vegetable because of how we use it and how it has been used.

I think both the students and I were a little more satisfied with the classification of tomatoes.  Hopefully, as students read and encounter words, they will think a little more critically about its name and the usage of that word.

Thank you Ms. Melodi Charles, Ms. Jennifer Swift, and the North Carolina State University Horticulture Lab for sharing your knowledge about plants with us; and above all, thank you for some food for thought.  I’ll have mine with a little tomato ketchup.

PBL, Inquiry, and Research: What a way to begin 2019!

As 2019 begins, I am hoping to do more to make STEM more equitable for the English learners that I work with.  As I continue using the PBL Process to get students to think like scientists with the Tomatosphere seed project, I have noticed that my students can collect data, interpret data, and communicate it well.  They are really beginning to think like scientists. I believe that my students are now ready to begin to implement project based learning, in earnest. I have asked that they come up with several questions about what they wonder or want to know about tomato plants and plants in general.  Some of the responses include: “Can tomato plants grow without water?”, “How long does it take for the seeds to turn into plants?”, and “What makes tomatoes change colors?”          

I was really amazed by their genuine curiousity about the subject, the personal connections that they made, and the amount of background they already had about tomatoes and plants.  I think that this will become a great launchpad for their research going forward.  Students will be using Epic! non-fiction books, a symbaloo of web sites, and a Skype conversation with a botanist from NC State to research and answer their questions.

I feel that by allowing the students to research the questions that they have generated, this will motivate them to read more and thus will improve the quantity of their writing about a subject.

The emphasis of the lessons in this unit however, is not entirely on content-acquisition, although students are acquiring information about tomatoes and plants, their focus is on evidence-based writing and supporting their speaking with fact-based details.  The students will practice communicating information that is supported with evidence from a source.  To assess themselves and other students and to simultaneously create notes on information about content, students will be creating their own Kahoot! questions to use for game style review. 

Although most of my students still need some support to be able to communicate using science discourse and vocabulary independently, a major advantage to this project is the fact that students are collecting and interpreting real data about an experiment that they are invested in.  I have already seen a difference in the manner that they communicate.  I hope that this continues as they begin to collect and visually differentiate the data from the different kinds of tomato seeds.