Complex Numbers

Fruits of Our Labors

Appropriately enough, the first entry after the completion of my five-year daily blogging streak is from Cracked:

    How the Tomato Became Torn Between the Lands of Fruits and Vegetables  
A confusing, red, plant-based chimera

Right, because the most important characteristic of a tomato is which category we pigeonhole it into. But, okay, I'll play along.

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.

That sounds serious. Maybe, instead, take a break and think about Pluto for a while.

As it sits today, the tomato is indeed, botanically a fruit. At the same time, it is legally a vegetable...

Yes, and my mom was, to me, my mother, but to my dad, she was his wife. So?

First, let’s stick to the science, which decidedly declares a tomato a fruit according to botanical guidelines.

Well, botanically, it's a berry. And, according to botany, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries are not berries. Why this would matter to anyone trying to fix dinner or dessert, though, is beyond my comprehension.

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.

Here's where I usually rant about how common sense is usually wrong and needs to be superseded by science. But the classification of a tomato isn't like studying what its nutritional characteristics are. Categories and classifications are imposed from the outside and are supposed to help us make sense of the universe, like what the definition of "planet" or "mammal" should be. Then something like a platypus comes along to remind us that the universe fundamentally doesn't make sense and we shouldn't expect it to. Point is, we could just as well say "any topping on a Big Mac is officially a vegetable," which might settle the tomato question once and for all, but move the discussion to whether cheese should be called a vegetable or not.

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.

It also should come as no shock that, in some cases, a thing can be categorized as one thing in one context, and another thing in other contexts. Like, astronomers consider any element that's not hydrogen or helium to be a "metal." That works for astronomy. It doesn't work for structural engineering.

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

Leaving aside for the moment that botanists and biologists are also (usually) people, all that means is that, in the US, tomatoes are vegetables by legal definition. I vaguely remember some nonsense a while back about whether ketchup, which doesn't have to be made from tomatoes but usually is, should also be considered a vegetable for the purpose of school lunch nutrition or something.

Left unsettled, then, is still the question of whether a hot dog (with or without ketchup) is a sandwich, and I maintain that no, it's a taco.