If this is a joke, Dedue is fairly certain that this would be the point where said joke would be revealed, so her continued sincerity must be genuine. And she does, indeed, bear a kind of... passing resemblance to one of his old schoolmates, which does help to convince Dedue that she's being earnest.

And she is apparently new in town?

"I see," Dedue says, which is entirely a placeholder as he tries to determine a reasonable explanation for why someone would ask if their eggplant has teeth. Is it an issue of translation, and she means something else but only knows this particular word to describe it? It doesn't seem like that's the case, and he hadn't encountered any previous problems with language barriers, either.

"I do not believe that vegetables usually grow teeth here." He sure hopes that they don't, because none of the materials that he'd received mentioned anything like that and it would be a hell of a surprise to bite into a tomato and find out that it bites back. "There is some produce that is fit only for consumption by Pokemon, but it is clearly marked. I understand that it will make humans ill if they eat it, but not fatally so."