Is a Tomato a Fruit or a Vegetable? The Argument, Settled

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

Is a tomato a fruit? Yes, if you ask a botanist. No, if you ask a cook, a grocer or the US Supreme Court in 1893. Both answers are correct, because "fruit" means one thing in plant science and another thing in the kitchen, and the tomato sits right on the line between them.

That is why this argument can run for an entire dinner. One person is talking about how the plant reproduces, the other is talking about what goes in the salad, and both keep saying the same word. When one word carries two meanings and people talk past each other, you are in equivocation territory. Name the two meanings and the fight mostly ends.

The case for fruit: what botany says

In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure a flowering plant forms from its ovary after it flowers. A tomato fits that description exactly: the flower is pollinated, the ovary swells into the red, juicy part, and the seeds sit inside. Botanists go further and call the tomato a berry. Even the Cambridge Dictionary has a specialized sense of fruit as the part of any plant that holds the seeds.

The fruit side also has a second, sneaky point. There is no botanical definition of a vegetable at all. Vegetable is a cooking and shopping word for edible plant parts, mostly savory ones, whether they are leaves, roots, stems or fruits. So the tomato is not a botanical fruit pretending to be a botanical vegetable. It is a botanical fruit that cooks happen to call a vegetable.

• It grows from the flower and contains the seeds, the textbook definition of a fruit.
• Botanically it is a berry.
• Plenty of other kitchen vegetables are botanical fruits too: cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, eggplants, bell peppers, corn, beans and peas.

The verdict

What it sounds like

The case for vegetable: the kitchen and the Supreme Court

The vegetable side argues from how people actually use the word. Fruit, in ordinary speech, is the sweet stuff: apples, grapes, strawberries, dessert. Tomatoes go in sauce, soup, salad and sandwiches. Nobody serves a bowl of tomatoes with whipped cream, and a recipe that calls for a cup of fruit is never hoping you reach for a tomato.

This side also has a court ruling. The Tariff Act of 1883 put a 10 percent duty on imported vegetables, while green, ripe or dried fruit was on the duty-free list. The Nix family, who imported tomatoes from the West Indies in 1886, paid the vegetable duty under protest and sued Edward Hedden, the customs collector of the Port of New York, arguing that a tomato is a fruit.

In Nix v. Hedden, decided on May 10, 1893, a unanimous Supreme Court disagreed. Justice Horace Gray granted that, botanically, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just like cucumbers, squash, beans and peas. But the tariff used words in their ordinary meaning, and in common speech those are vegetables, served at dinner with the soup, fish or meat rather than as dessert. So for the purposes of the tax, the tomato was a vegetable.

Why both sides are right

The Supreme Court did not overrule botany. It decided which meaning Congress had in mind when it wrote a tax law, and it openly admitted the botanical point while doing so. That is the cleanest possible summary of the whole debate: the word fruit has a scientific meaning and an everyday meaning, and the tomato is a fruit in the first and a vegetable in the second.

The same split runs in the other direction. Rhubarb is baked into pies and treated like a fruit, but the part we eat is a leaf stalk. Strawberries and raspberries are called berries at the store, yet botanists say they are not berries at all, while bananas, cucumbers and eggplants are. And state lawmakers cannot agree either: Ohio made the tomato its official state fruit in 2009, and Arkansas named its pink tomato both the state fruit and the state vegetable in the same law.

It is the same shape as the fight over whether a hot dog is a sandwich: a technical definition on one side, everyday usage on the other, and each camp right about its own question.

When each answer applies

The useful question is not which answer is true, since both are, but which one fits the situation you are in. Here is a quick guide:

• Biology class, gardening, trivia night: it is a fruit, specifically a berry.
• Cooking, recipes, menus and meal planning: treat it as a vegetable.
• Grocery stores and produce aisles: it sits with the vegetables, and that is fine.
• Law and tax: whatever the specific rule says, read in ordinary language, which is how the 1893 Court handled it.
• Fruit salad: there is an old joke that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

The ruling

A tomato is a fruit in botany and a vegetable in the kitchen. The fruit side is right about what the plant is doing; the vegetable side is right about how people cook and talk. The Supreme Court sided with the vegetable camp for tax purposes only, while agreeing with the botanists on the science.

So the person who says "technically it's a fruit" wins the trivia point, and the person who puts it in the salad instead of the fruit bowl wins dinner. If your version of this argument has more riding on it than a salad, paste both sides into the argument judge.