In this absolutely delightful and highly recommended book, National Book Award Finalist, Newbery Honoree, and two-time Stonewall Award winner Kyle Lukoff uses his long-standing interest in the (non-)category of vegetables to encourage critical thinking about social constructs.
When a child named Chester goes to the community garden to get some vegetables for a salad, the anthropomorphic plants in the garden—cauliflower, carrots, brussels sprouts, and more—soon inform him that there are no vegetables there. In fact, a kale plant explains, “There’s no such thing as vegetables.” Broccoli is a flower, potato is a root, and eggplants and peppers are fruits, the other plants tell him.
Chester tries to define a vegetable, only to be foiled by exceptions pointed out by the clever plants. Exasperated, he asks why people call them vegetables, to which they respond by noting other concepts that humans have made up, including money, countries and states, and even words.
No, there’s no obvious queer inclusion here, and the book never mentions gender, but the story’s questioning of categories can clearly be applied to the concept of gender, among many other things. Indeed, in Lukoff’s middle grade novel Different Kinds of Fruit, nonbinary character Bailey brings up the idea that “there’s no such thing as vegetables” and says that human-created categories “don’t always do a good job of explaining the world.” People might look at Bailey, they continue, and decide they’re a boy because of certain characteristics, or a girl because of others, “but ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ aren’t even important categories.” (Lukoff also had the trans protagonist of his Newbery Honor-winning middle-grade novel Too Bright to See note that vegetables don’t exist.)
In the one-page afterward to There’s No Such Thing as Vegetables, Lukoff explains further, “One kind of category is called a social construct,” which are “ideas that groups of people invent together.” He asks readers to think about other social constructs they may know of, to question why people are split into groups, and to figure out which social constructs are helpful and which harmful, as a prelude to making change.
Readers at the younger end of the stated 4- to 8-year-old age range for the book may view it simply as a lively story of chatty produce trying to avoid ending up in a lunch bowl, and enjoy the fun details in illustrator Andrea Tsurumi’s whimsical illustrations. (I was particularly struck by the adorable little kohlrabi.) Slightly older readers, however (and their grown-ups), should enjoy not only the entertaining story, but also the challenge that Lukoff presents.
Lukoff’s dry sense of humor is also in full bloom here—and while we’ve seen this in many of his books, the tone mostly reminds me of his hugely amusing but lesser-known earlier titles, A Storytelling of Ravens and Explosion at the Poem Factory. I am all in for this. Anyone who thinks that teaching about LGBTQ or other social justice topics requires a serious approach could learn a lot from this book. Lukoff isn’t hitting readers over the head with an explicit connection to gender or race or any social concept, but he is helping them to think critically about the world around them, sowing seeds for future harvests. It’s an approach that should lead to strong roots.
He notes in the afterward that he first learned that tomatoes were a fruit, not a vegetable, when he was seven, and he’s been interested in categories ever since. It feels like Lukoff is finally fully a-dressing a concept that he has tossed around for a while; we should be grapeful that he hasn’t been able to leaf it alone. Salad days indeed.
