The Supreme Court taxed the tomato as a vegetable in 1893
Botanists know a tomato as a fruit—the ovary of a flowering plant. U.S. customs officers, armed with the Tariff of 1883, called it a vegetable. In Nix v. Hedden the justices unanimously sided with the tariff schedule while admitting the botanical truth. Language, not biology, won.
Vegetable entered English in the early fifteenth century from Old French and Medieval Latin vegetabilis, first meaning any growing plant. Only in the eighteenth century did it settle as plant grown for food; the slang veggie appears in 1955. Culinary tradition then draws a messy line: savoury items such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers count as vegetables at the table even when they are botanical fruits, which is why markets and science keep talking past each other.
Foraging gave way to cultivation roughly between 10,000 and 7,000 BC. Staples differed by place—maize for Aztecs, southern Chinese rice versus northern wheat noodles, Egyptian bread that often wore down teeth with sand, Greek bread with olives and lentils, Roman porridge of emmer or beans with greens. Across those diets, vegetables stretched scarce meat into filling meals rich in fiber and vitamins A, C, and E that modern nutrition still prizes.
Nutrition guidance still urges several daily portions because plant sides tend to be low in fat yet bulky, and diets rich in them associate with lower rates of cancer, stroke, and heart disease in population studies. The 1893 tomato tariff case remains the perfect parable: science and the dinner plate disagree, courts pick the dinner plate for tax law, and shoppers keep both meanings without noticing the contradiction that still shapes labels and recipes. Raw produce carries its own risks: leafy greens and fruit are linked to nearly half of American norovirus stomach infections, usually after an infected handler touches food that is eaten uncooked. Chewing hard, crunchy vegetables in childhood also matters, because growing jaws need that work to reach full size.
Source: Vegetable
