Tomato.

I am known, among my friends and family, for my dislike of tomatoes. I acknowledge the tomato as a valuable ingredient in many sauces and soups and other such things, but I can't stand the taste of a tomato on its own, and I find it generally degrades the experience of a sandwich or salad with its bitter taste and juicy entrails. In short, I find the tomato to be a rather odious vegetable.

But this is not about my distaste for tomatoes. If you like tomatoes, then by all means, more for you! I shan't quarrel with you over this matter of mere taste. I leave you to a happy lifetime of not having to remember to ask waiters for the tomatoes to be removed from your dish, and not having to pick the tomatoes out of your food when you forget.

Luigi Chiesa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons,

Rather, I'm writing this because I know that the last sentence of my first paragraph will provoke a particular response among some readers. These readers will object to my characterizing the tomato as a vegetable. They will rush to correct me, to say that tomatoes are, in fact, fruits, not vegetables. It is this notion, this widespread cultural meme that tomatoes are not vegetables because they are fruits, that I write to oppose. Those who propagate this notion I shall call anti-vegetablists.¹

I am not writing from a place of opposition to pedantry. We are well served, as a society, by people caring about accuracy and technicalities, even if that care is not always expressed as politely or thoughtfully as it ought to be. I can appreciate good pedantry, but anti-vegetablism is not good pedantry. It is the lowest form of pedantry: incorrect pedantry.

What are we talking about?

I do not now deny, nor have I ever denied, that a tomato is a fruit. If we consult our friend Wikipedia, we learn that, botanically, a fruit is “the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants (angiosperms) that is formed from the ovary after flowering.” This is true of the tomato. The tomato is, therefore, clearly a fruit. Where I must object to the anti-vegetablist camp is in the assertion that this fact renders the tomato a non-vegetable.

The implicit position of the anti-vegetablist is that fruit and vegetable are mutually exclusive categories, that is to say, that a fruit cannot be a vegetable. This is, quite frankly, a load of balderdash.

You see, whereas fruit is a botanical category, vegetable is a much more nebulous term, one which (once again consulting our friend Wikipedia) can refer either broadly to any edible part of a plant, or more narrowly to those parts of plants which are considered “vegetables” by culinary tradition. By the broad definition, not only are the categories not mutually exclusive, but in fact all edible fruits would be considered vegetables.

But let's ignore the broader definition and just talk about culinary tradition. Now, I'm no expert in the culinary arts, but I wouldn't find it at all strange if I ordered a vegetable dish (perhaps a salad or a stir fry of some kind) at a restaurant and I was brought a plate with squash, zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, and/or cucumber. All of these are fairly typical vegetables, and they are also all fruits. Yet very few people ever speak up to insist that we refrain from calling these vegetables.

This topic was also explored in the oft-maligned 1893 Supreme Court decision Nix v. Hedden, where a produce seller sued the Collector of the Port of New York for collecting a tariff on his imported tomatoes under the Tariff Act of 1883, which provided for a tariff on vegetables but not fruits. The unanimous decision of the Court was that, for the purposes of of the Tariff Act, tomatoes counted as vegetables. The Court acknowledged that, in botanical terms, “tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas.” But, in common language, all of these are considered vegetables. They noted that all of those vegetables are traditionally served with dinner, rather than as dessert.

The Supreme Court was right to make this decision: for the purposes of the law, tomatoes were more aptly characterized as vegetables than as fruits. They are both. Which category is relevant depends on what the purpose of categorizing them is, but neither categorization invalidates the other.

Any pedantry which suggests that fruits cannot be vegetables is quite simply ill-founded from the start. Tomatoes are culinary vegetables, and there is absolutely no reason that a fruit cannot be a vegetable.

So what?

I'm sick of hearing it. I've heard it since I was a child. In fact, I think everyone has heard it since they were a child. Being told that “a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable” seems to be a quintessential childhood experience, on par with learning the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”² It is difficult for me to imagine an American child growing up without, at some point, learning that tomatoes are fruits.

And yet, despite the ubiquity of this experience, any time you use the word “vegetable” in the same sentence as the word “tomato,” an anti-vegetablist will show up to “correct” you on this point, apparently assuming you had a childhood so sheltered that nobody ever told you the truth about tomatoes. It's insulting, and it's all the more irritating because it's not even an accurate correction! Tomatoes are vegetables!

Annoyance alone is sufficient to warrant a blog post like this. It's my blog and I can write whatever I want. But more than a mere irritation, I believe that anti-vegetablism is a plague on our society. A minor one, no doubt, more akin to the common cold than the bubonic plague, but still a plague.

Let me ask a question: who benefits from hearing the utterance “a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable”? My answer: no one. There is no situation in which this is a helpful thing to say. A child hearing it for the first time learns to place fruits and vegetables into a false dichotomy. Anyone else hearing it learns nothing new, and is either temporarily embarrassed at their foolish lapse from anti-vegetablist dogma, or is annoyed at being corrected when they said nothing wrong. The only benefit it offers is the smug satisfaction of having corrected someone.

This smugness is unearned. It's stolen valor. It's intellectual laziness masquerading as superiority. It reflects a culture of unearned smug know-it-all-ness. Are we so desperate to be smarter than others that we'll just uncritically repeat little phrases we learned as children? Engage in the hostile deployment of a little factoid without even fact-checking ourselves? Draw little boxes around categories without even stopping to think whether those boxes even make sense, or how they interact with one another?

Yes, I'm afraid that there's a deeper lesson here: many of us want for a tomato to just be one thing. Only a fruit, not a vegetable. We want the world to fit into tidy little non-overlapping categories. Reality does not indulge us in this childish fantasy. The world is a messy place, and the way we draw lines around reality is fundamentally arbitrary, inescapably incomplete and imperfect. Anti-vegetablism asks you to hold onto this naïve view of the world. I am asking you to let go of it and accept the world for its many complexities.³

Let's call the whole thing off

I imagine this whole thing started fairly innocently. Just a little fun fact: “Hey, did you know that a tomato is actually a fruit?” But it clearly spiraled out of control. For who knows how long, we have been poisoning our children's minds with this lie, this insidious falsehood that a fruit cannot be a vegetable. This lie, implanted so early, is carried by many into adulthood, where some will even weaponize it against anyone who dares to use the v-word in reference to that fruit.

This is unacceptable. It must end. We must stamp out anti-vegetablism wherever it rears its ugly head. If someone tells you a tomato is not a vegetable, stand your ground. Tell them it is. If they insist that it's a fruit, say “I know. Fruits can be vegetables.” Break down this false dichotomy, and guard yourself against others. See the world for the multifaceted place it is, and accept that human-imposed categories are mere inventions, not objective realities.

But please, don't serve me any tomatoes. I'll stick to fruits and vegetables that taste good.