Oh boy, nothing boils my milk more than when someone tries to correct my grammar. That’s not to say I’m a perfect orator or an infallible linguist. We all make slips of the tongue or sometimes drop new words into our vocabulary without fully understanding them. But often when someone feels the need to correct your grammar mid-sentence, it’s just petty. It’s condescending. And most importantly, it’s usually not even correct.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: ‘Um actually, spider’s aren’t bugs; they’re arachnids.’ Or this one: ‘Well, it’s not a germ; it’s a virus.’ Or this old chestnut, the most annoying of all: ‘Well technically, tomatoes aren’t vegetables. They’re fruits.’
Ok. You wanna get technical? Come on, let’s get technical!
What Is a Fruit?
The common botanical definition of a fruit is “the ripened ovary or the seed-bearing organ of a plant.”1 By this definition from the New York Botanical Garden, berries are fruits. But also nuts are fruits. And legumes are fruits. As a matter of fact, a lot of foods we think of as vegetables are fruits, such as corn kernels, peanuts, pumpkins, peapods, avocados, and yes, tomatoes. Even some grains like rice and wheat are technically fruits (or large seeds inside of small fruit coverings).
Nuts
Once you delve into the scientific definitions of plant-life, it will completely warp your perception of almost all foods. For example, did you know almonds, cashews, pecans, pistachios and walnuts are all technically (botanically speaking) drupes and not actually nuts? Peanuts aren’t nuts either. They’re legumes.
Berries
Also, by the botanical definition, many of what we call berries are not actually berries. Strawberries do not fit the botanical definition of berries. And neither do raspberries nor blackberries. But guess what fruits do fit this definition of a berry? Bananas, plantains, watermelons, cucumbers and…Oh hey! Tomatoes. Not only are tomatoes fruits, they’re actually berries!
Oranges
The type of people who make a big to-do about tomatoes actually being fruits will often get pretty pedantic when it comes to oranges as well. But orange is not a particularly useful scientific term and has a very vague general usage referring basically to any orange-colored citrus fruit. Naval oranges and mandarin oranges are obviously oranges. But clementines are also a type of orange created by crossing mandarin oranges with sweet oranges. And the term tangerine refers to a vague group of citrus fruits, generally smaller than common oranges, some of them deriving from mandarin oranges.
Though tomatoes are sometimes colored orange, to my knowledge, no one has yet referred to a tomato as a type of orange.
What Is a Vegetable?
If so many foods are technically fruits, then what exactly is a vegetable? Well, this is both much simpler, and unfortunately much more complicated.
Merriam-Webster defines vegetation quite simply as ‘plant life’ 2. And even the New York Botanical Garden’s glossary of botanical terms defines vegetative as “the reproductive parts of a plant, e.g., the leaves, stems, and roots.” 3 So depending on what definition we want to use, all fruits (and grains and nuts and spices and herbs) are vegetables. Rice is a vegetable. Bananas are vegetables. Peanuts are vegetables.
The Law
But legally speaking, rhubarb is most definitely not a vegetable. In 1947, the legal team organized by Barnes, Richardson & Colburn, LLP argued that rhubarb should be taxed as a fruit rather than a vegetable. And they won that argument in court. Their argument seemed to rest mainly with what context the food was eaten. They said rhubarb “was typically eaten as pie, stewed as a dessert, and with cream for breakfast. Testimony before the court indicated that it was never eaten as a side dish with poultry”4
Though, botanically speaking, rhubarb is most definitely not a fruit, legally and culinarily, it sort of is. The legal team was even able to cite an earlier case in 1896 in which “the Supreme Court held that tomatoes are, for tariff purposes, vegetables because they are more likely to be eaten with dinner than as dessert.”
This wasn’t the last time the US government made legislation on what is and is not vegetable. In 2011, the US Congress reaffirmed that legally, pizza could be declared a vegetable. At the time, the US Department of Agriculture was attempting to set new guidelines on school lunches. They wanted to change some of the language surrounding vegetables and tomato paste. But over time the bill was water down so much that it “would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable”.5
Spheres of Language
So scientifically speaking, many vegetables are technically fruits. But then again, all fruits are technically vegetables. Culinarily speaking, this certainly does limit our language and how we talk about food. Sometimes it makes sense to refer to rhubarb as a fruit even though it doesn’t quite make sense botanically speaking. Sometimes it makes having a conversation about cooking easier if we call avocados vegetables rather than fruits. And yeah, maybe if you look at the whole of the culinary world, tomatoes do kinda make more sense a vegetable than as a fruit.
There are many ways to categorize things. The scientific community has hard rules for how it systematizes the world’s organisms. But sometimes other fields of interest require other terms of categorization. Are we talking botanically, culinarily, legally, culturally?
And ultimately the whole issue comes down to the fact that whether a tomato is technically a fruit or technically a vegetable has less to do with biology, botany, cooking or the law than it has to do with language.
Logical Fallacies
When talking about the classification of tomatoes, you’ll often see the definist fallacy used.6 This is where someone will chose whichever definition of ‘fruit’ will make their argument correct, regardless of what the original speaker meant. You see people use this fallacy a lot when it comes to racism. Racism can be defined as prejudice by race. But it can also refer to systemic racism that can only be done by those in power. If you want to avoid accusations of racism, just pick the definition that suits you best.
You could also call this the affirming a disjunct fallacy.7 This is when someone assumes that if one of two choices is true, then the other is not true. So for example, if we know that tomatoes are (technically) both a fruit and a vegetable. And you say, “Tomatoes are my favorite vegetable.” And your friend responds, “Well actually, tomatoes are fruits.” This is logically false. Yes, it is true that tomatoes are fruits. But that doesn’t mean that tomatoes are not vegetables.
Then again, there’s no better way to come across as an insufferable neckbeard than to start quoting logical fallacies at people. Really, all of this is to say, just stop being pedantic. It’s annoying. If someone calls a tomato a vegetable, just let it go. And if you call a tomato a vegetable, and someone starts to say, “Well, actually…”, the proper and just response, according to Emily Post, is to say, “Oh, shut up!”
- “fruit” | Glossary for Vascular Plants | New York Botanical Garden
- ‘vegetation‘ | Merriam-Webster
- “vegetative” | Glossary for Vascular Plants | New York Botanical Garden
- “1947: The Great Rhubarb Controversy” | Barnes, Richardson & Colburn, LLP
- Jalonick, Mary Clare | “Pizza is a vegetable? Congress says yes” | NBC News | 15 Nov 2011
- “Definist Fallacy” | Logically Fallacious
- “Affirming a Disjunct” | Logically Fallacious