Drabble by Kevin Fagan for June 23, 2014

How about some tomato flavored ice cream?Or perhaps some carrot/orange?

Tomato is a berry if speaking botanically. In cooking, a plant is fruit if sweet and vegetable if savory so everyone is right.

Just cuz we don’t buy ’em…

Go to The French Laundry

There’s a place outside New Orleans that sells pickle snowballs. Pickle juice on shaved ice and on request, they’ll add a big pickle to it.

* In New Orleans, we call ’em snowballs.

It depends on who gets to decide the meanings of the words: botanists or everybody else. Why should they get to decide on the definitions of words in the English language? That’s the job of dictionaries, not scientists!

I say a tomato is a vegetable because that’s the way the word is used in the English language. Let scientists use their own jargon however they want, but don’t make me use the definitions they’ve made up for their own use.

Technically, any part of the plant that contains the seeds is a fruit. Tomatoes are fruit, as are cucumbers, pumpkins, corn cobs, etc. Technically, a vegetable is any food that comes from a plants. Therefore a tomato and all of the above are both fruit and vegetable.

A smart person knows that a tomato is a fruit. A wise person knows not to add it to a fruit salad.

Set aside your political leanings for a moment — as well as the unproductive fruit/vegetable argument. If you look up the nutritional value of ketchup, you will see that it has plenty of nutritional value. Not as much as tomato soup, perhaps, but more than some vegetables that you wouldn’t scoff at. It makes perfect sense to count the nutritional contribution of ketchup as part of the nutritional value of the whole meal. -BTW, here’s a link to the best (free) website on food nutrition facts that I’ve ever found on-line:-http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/3015/2

JPuzzleWhiz: Watermelon, all gourds (squash, etc.), pumpkin, some beans,

Cuz…..yuck!

Superb reading: Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook.