Fourth Grade is currently studying the five food groups: Meat, Milk/Dairy, Fruits/Vegetables, Breads/Cereals and of course the latter being their favourite - the Junk food group!
On Friday we got together with our honary guest, Mrs. Chung to celebrate the importance of eating a variety of foods daily from each of the four food groups. Of course it's hard to resist the fifth food group - the sweets and fats!
So tell me, is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Well, it depends on who you ask, a botantist or horticulturist. For all practical purposes most people say it's a fruit. It's legal and technical mumbo-jumbo that claims it to be a vegetable.
Botanically speaking, the tomato is a fruit and is classified as a berry because it has seeds! It is a fruit because it is a ripened mature ovary containing seed. One can confirm this by looking up both "fruit" and "tomato" in a dictionary. Things like peppers, eggplants and cucumbers are also fruits by this definition.
Horticulturally speaking it is defined as a vegetable for two other reasons:
1- it is a nonwoody annual
2- it was classified this way in 1893 by the Supreme Court for trade reasons (imposing import taxes to protect growers)
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