The Japanese Radish

Today, I got a vegetable as a gift. I can see you all now, picturing someone handing me a tiny carrot or a single head of broccoli. Not the case. This vegetable is a Japanese white radish. I think it could easily set some records for its massive size. That’s what she said. Sorry, I couldn't help myself with an opportunity like that. It is about three feet long, easily (that’s what she said, again. Okay, I’m done now.).

Honestly, I just don’t know how to approach this vegetable, much like the nerdy kid in class trying to ask the most popular girl in class out on a date. Actually, since I am trying to chop up and eat it, perhaps that is the wrong analogy. I feel more like a lion observing a giraffe from afar. I desperately want to eat it, but it seems too difficult a task. I feel like I need to call up my lion friends to act as backup in the giraffe ambush.

I think this radish could easily win in a fight against my lone dollar-store kitchen knife. So I am left with a couple of options. Purchase a costly new knife that could actually slice through an enormous radish or spend an hour slowly hacking away at it with the pathetic knife I already own.

GIANT RADISH!

Another teacher suggested that I use it for bicep curls, since the thing easily weighs about 8 pounds. It led to a good deal of laughs in the teacher room when I acted out a radish workout.

Personally, I am holding out hope for a third option: that it magically transforms into a radish spirit like the one in Spirited Away. I refuse to let it rot. I will not allow such an impressive, homegrown vegetable to die in any way other than being digested by me. Perhaps I will just eat it raw, bite-by-bite. That doesn't sound too appealing, so I’ll just keep repeating the mental mantra, “please let it turn into a radish spirit,” over and over in my mind until it happens. That’s totally logical, right?
 

The radish spirit

Fruit? Vegetable?

I knew that there would be a problem teaching my special education class this week the instant I laid eyes on the worksheet that the head teacher wanted me to use. It sounds simple: he wanted to test the understanding of the students by giving them a worksheet depicting many fruits and vegetables and having them circle the answers when I say, for example, “red fruits.”

I started panicking a bit when I saw that tomatoes were one of the items of produce from which they could select. Crap. If I were to say “circle the red fruits,” would I have to count it wrong if they omitted the tomato? If I say “brown vegetables” and they circle the mushroom would I count it wrong because a mushroom is not a vegetable, but a fungus? What definition did the teacher want me to use? Culinary classification, which considers whether something is a fruit or a vegetable based on taste, or botanical classification, which defines a fruit as an edible plant containing seeds?

I’m about to go a bit Bill Nye on all of you. It’s time, once and for all, for us to understand what makes a fruit a fruit. According to livescience.com, a fruit is “a seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary of a flowering plant, whereas vegetables are all other plant parts, such as roots, leaves and stems.” So, technically, olives, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and pumpkins are all fruits. FRUITS!

However, the above only applies if you just want to follow the botanical definition. If you want to go with the culinary definition, things that taste sweet are considered fruits, and things that taste savory, like the aforementioned botanical fruits peppers, eggplants and pumpkins, are vegetables. On the flipside, rhubarb is a botanical vegetable but a culinary fruit. Confused yet?

Here’s a little history/law lesson for you, too. When deciding whether tomatoes should be taxed as a fruit or a vegetable, the Supreme Court elected to consider them a vegetable because that is “standard” and “common.” I wonder how eggplants and olives are taxed…

Well, in the end, I decided to just say “orange fruit” for which they could only circle the orange. I was immensely thankful that the worksheet’s creator didn't decide to depict a pumpkin, too, or I would have felt even more lost and confused.

But... WHAT IS A FRUIT!?