How the Tomato Became Torn Between the Lands of Fruits and Vegetables

I don’t know what it is about the fruit-versus-vegetable designation of a tomato that I find so particularly annoying, but it twists in my brain like a knife. Even worse, this rabbit hole plunges all the way down to the Earth’s core. 

As it sits today, the tomato is indeed, botanically a fruit. At the same time, it is legally a vegetable, a term that I thought was more applied figuratively to euthanasia cases than literally to the earth’s flora, but here we are.

First, let’s stick to the science, which decidedly declares a tomato a fruit according to botanical guidelines. That’s because they are a flower ovary that contains seeds (yum!). Tomatoes form from flowers that grow on a vine, putting them in the fruit category. So yes, if your most annoying friend is speaking in a strictly scientific sense, as they often are, they would be correct that tomatoes are a fruit, and ketchup’s a weird vinegar-based jam, or wherever they’d like to go with it.

Where the other side of the argument comes from is the culinary world, the place where most people are interacting with tomatoes on a daily basis. It’s also the dominant layman’s classification, probably due to the fact that it’s based in common fucking sense. Cooks and those in the culinary fields could give a fried rat’s ass how the tomato came to be, and are more focused on the characteristics it presents in the endgame. The fact that tomatoes are fleshy and not particularly sweet make them more at home in the vegetable drawer. After all, if the culinary world was to fully sync up with the scientific, we'd also have to start calling pumpkins and green beans fruits, too, which, well and truly fuck off.

And yet, no less of an authority than the Supreme Court has ruled differently. Unsurprisingly, it’s money-related, specifically to do with tariffs. In the late 1800s in America, the taxation on fruits and vegetables was starkly different. Fruits could be imported with impunity, while bringing in foreign veggies would demand a steep 10-percent tariff. An importer named John Nix saw opportunity in the science, and refused to pay tariffs on a shipment of tomatoes, since they were technically fruits. The case climbed all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was heard in 1893.

So, once the curiosity came to be the subject of legal ruling, what did the Supreme Court decide? 

Well, the ruling is remarkably similar to the way this conversation usually ends in practice. It even has the same air of exasperation. Justice Horace Gray wrote in his opinion: “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas, but in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables.”

As I read it, the Supreme Court agrees with the people, issuing the legal equivalent of “sure, technically, but come on, dude.”