Genevieve Scales

I believe with my whole entire heart that tomatoes are vegetables because they do not go into fruit salad.

Of course, any botanist will tell you that—obviously, you stupid idiot—the tomato is quite literally the fruit of the plant Solanum lycopersicum, and this is true, botanically. But I urge you to stop cherry-picking your data and use Google, the true reflector of our cultural status, to search up the term “vegetables.” In almost every picture, you will find a pair of big, fat, juicy, stinking red tomatoes. This proves my point that while a tomato may be a fruit, we treat it as a vegetable. Nothing else matters unless you are a real, actual, honest-to-God botanist who needs to communicate clearly with other botanists. You are (probably) not a botanist. To you, a tomato is a vegetable. Don’t lie.

As passionate as I am about the nature of tomatoes, they aren’t (that) important. This little personality quirk of mine serves as a fun conceit for what I believe to be a very important subject, which is the question of how we label the world around us, and, more importantly, ourselves.

When I was in eighth grade, the Covid-19 pandemic had been raging for quite some time. I was isolated inside, with only my friends on Discord to keep me company. I vividly remember quite well playing Minecraft with my two closest friends when one of them came out as a transgender woman. This was the most exposure I had ever had to the LGBTQ+ community, and I was suddenly curious about many things. She invited me to a number of LGBTQ+ Discord servers, through which I discovered that I was, in fact, an alloromantic pansexual cisgender man.

What does that mean? Well, you can consult the LGBTQIA+ Wikipedia page, which lists the myriad sexual and romantic orientations and gender expressions, with flags included. To be clear, I think it is fantastic that this resource exists, and I am glad that so many people, especially teenagers, are finding pieces of themselves in what can be a very lonely world. The LGBTQ+ community was very beneficial for my teenage self, and I hope it continues to be a safe and protective space for many others.

Then I turned 15 and realized that I wasn’t really into guys at all. I came out to my friends and family as straight, which is sort of a rare experience. I guess you could say I was lying about being straight—as you will soon find out, it’s a little more complicated than that—but I had figured out a few things about myself and sexuality:

1) Your sexuality is nobody’s business but yours. You may choose to date someone of any gender, but for all anyone needs to know, that is a single point on a graph. Tomatoes know they are fruits. They (usually) do not go into fruit salad because that is not what they want.

2) I am mostly attracted to women, but who’s to say there isn’t one guy out there? Can you ever really be sure? In my eyes, sexuality is just another way of articulating your type. I might be into people with green eyes, but just because I date someone with brown eyes doesn’t mean I need to tell everyone my type is now people with brown and green eyes. I’ll amend my above statement: there is conceivably a fruit salad out there where a tomato would actually work quite well with the other flavors.

3) If you are lucky, you will fall in love at least once. Let’s say you’re really living and you meet five different special people. Those five people are all that matter. They are the dots on the graph, but they don’t have to connect. Your sexuality is not a math equation describing the people you can love, and to think of it as such is only to limit yourself. You will eat a finite number of tomatoes. Some will be good and some will be bad and you might even marry one, but you cannot pretend to know the taste of every tomato ever.

Hopefully you caught on to my little metaphor there. My point in all of this is that when we label things, especially ourselves, we stop imagining what good things there could be out there. To imagine yourself as a part of a community is good and very important, but it is equally (perhaps even more) important to know that you are an individual who loves and eats and runs and learns. You should allow yourself to do all of those things limitlessly and in perpetuity, whether that means calling yourself something else or just allowing yourself to be swept away by how beautiful the world is. Please go tell someone you love them. And eat a tomato.

Austen Temple is a member of the Class of 2029.