No pomegranates

Background and reactions

Jane Martino is a former professor of psychology at the Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) in Boone, Iowa. In 2017, she taught a lecture at DMACC about developmental psychology; more specifically, the lecture focused on the effects of negative reinforcement, which increases the rate of a behavior that avoids or escapes an aversive situation or stimulus. During the lecture, she began screaming about pomegranates, which led one of the students in her classroom to record her and post his video on Twitter on October 11, 2017.

The video went viral, gaining around 140 thousand likes and 60 thousand retweets in two days. Due to the video's lack of context, users such as Simone Biles found the video humorous, while commenters on Breitbart, a far-right news website, deemed Martino a "screaming liberal professor", according to Inside Higher Ed. Reactions among Martino's classmates were more positive.

Martino agreed to an interview about the "no pomegranates" video, where she admitted she did not want to be known as the "pomegranate professor". She was surprised that her students recorded her, and explained that she was trying to tell the class that the word "no" did not provide a clear reason as to why children should avoid certain stimuli, such as drugs. Martino added that she chose pomegranates since students are unlikely to regularly consume them.

A 2024 book about public school administration used this video as an example of the risk of students filming parts of lessons and sharing them without context.