The Flying Ship

The Flying Ship

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Tomatoes



Okay. Tomatoes. They're a fruit. Not a vegetable.

No way! Tomatoes are used in the same places we use vegetables. They aren't a fruit.

Vegetable (noun):

A plant, or part of a plant used for food, such as a cabbage, turnip, potato or bean.

Fruit (noun):

The fleshy product of a tree or other plant that contains seed and can be eaten as a food.

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That means that all fruits that we eat are also vegetables (tomatoes, apples, pumpkin, cucumber). But not all vegetables are fruit (broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, asparagus).

So yeah. Just go home and stop arguing one way or the other. Tomatoes are both.

...


You may think it's weird that I rant against people arguing about whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables.

But it isn't really about tomatoes.

It's about humanity's frustrating obsession with the concept of binary exclusion. Lemme explain.

To most people, it seems like things have to be one thing OR the other. It drives me freakin' crazy.

Good or bad.

Ugly or beautiful.

Right or wrong.

Fruit or vegetable.

Because humans are obsessed with things being one thing or the other, they exclude the possibility that sometimes, and in my experience usually, these apparently contradictory ideas go hand in hand.

But the the truth is extremely resistant to simplification. Walt Disney was a racist... Who made a large number of sweet and beautiful animated movies.

Albert Einstein was a genius and revolutionary thinker. Who cheated on his wife.

The Internet is a magical thing. That is frequently filled with stupid people doing stupid crap.

A car is a wonder of engineering. That pollutes our precious environment.

A lion is majestic, and so is the zebra it kills to eat.

Because of a lack of acceptance of these things, we have stuff like sexism, racism and homophobia. That while others are different, actually, they're also the same.

If you accept that the world is not a simple place, that a tomato is a fruit AND a vegetable, you might just find that the world actually makes much more sense.

Binary is for computers, but you're better than that.