Diane Skorupski, age 12, St. datharines, Ontario,
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
If a tomato could talk, we could ask it. A smart tomato would answer the question with one of its own. Are you a girl, Diane, or a human being? You are both, of course. Well, the tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.
It is a vegetable because it belongs to the great plant, or vegetable kingdom. Our diet includes a lot of stuff from the vegetable kingdom„ We class the various items as fruit, cereals and vegetables, In this special meaning, we use the word vegetable to mean the cooked plants or parts of plants served at table, A disc of stewed tomatoes rates as a vegetable in this special sense.
The round, red tomato is also the fruit of the tomato plant. The fruit of any plant holds the seeds for the next generation. And the seeds are right there in the middle of the pulpy tomato meat. If left alone, the tomato ripens and falls to the ground, the skin bursts and the little seeds begin life by feeding on the fleshy pulp.
Each plant has its own way of caring for its seeds. They are provided for in many different kinds of fruit. One group produces juicy berries. Each raspberry seed is wrapped in a red glob of food. A berry is a cluster of seeds each huddled in its own food supply.
Apples, pears, melons and oranges cover a group of small seeds with one big pantry. We bite into these fleshy fruits and find the little seeds clustered near the center.
The seeds of the stone fruits are individually wrapped. These are the plums, cherries., and peaches; We bite into their soft food supply and find the stony pit in the middle . The pit is the seed.
Other plants provide harder rations for their seeds. An ear of wheat is the fruit of the wheat plant. Each little grain of cereal is a seed with, its own supply of concentrated food, An acorn is the fruit of the oak tree. And even hard nuts are fruits. They ripen and fall to the ground. The seed inside feeds on nut meat until it is strong enough to burst its prison walls,
Beans and peas are also fruit, They are sheltered in pods while the plants provide each seed with its own pantry,, The pod dries up when its job is done. It may pop open with a snap, showing the little fat seeds off to find a soft spot of soil in which to grow.
On our diet we list some of these items as fruit and some as vegetables. Strictly speaking all of them are fruits and all are members of the vegetable world. A botanist lists a tomato as a fruit. A cook lists it as a vegetable. In any case, it makes a delicious mouthful, whether stewed, in soup, raw in a salads squeezed into juice or pickled in catsup. It teems with vitamins A and C.