Abstract Recommendations from the Next Generation Science Standards and the Framework for K-12 Science Education call for instructors to present crosscutting concepts across courses and between disciplines. Consistent with these recommendations, the author, a physicist, has been part of a team of biologists who are developing curricular materials for an introductory biology course that explicitly build on ideas from introductory physics. A primary challenge in developing this curriculum lay in our different ways of conceptualizing energy, a topic identified as one of seven “crosscutting concepts,” and one where we expected to find a strong overlap between the disciplines. In this paper, I analyze the conceptual metaphor, common in introductory biology, that a food molecule “has” energy and discuss how that claim is at odds with the ways in which physics describes objects that have energy. I argue that the difference between biologists’ and physicists’ conceptual metaphors of energy stem from different cognitive models that structure disciplinary questions and explanations. This analysis suggests that research and curricular development in interdisciplinary areas may benefit from paying explicit attention to varying disciplinary goals and how those shape the ways in which “crosscutting concepts” have meaning within disciplines. Furthermore, rather than curriculum and instruction scaffolding students’ construction of one “best” model of energy that will work across scientific disciplines and does not “establish misconceptions,” this analysis argues that a productive understanding of energy will require that learners construct and develop a range of models for this (and other) concepts, suitable for the myriad disciplines in which energy finds a home.