You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to. Science says to-may-to, but the law says to-mah-to. It’s said that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. But is that knowledge correct? Is a tomato actually a fruit? Not according to the wisdom of the Supreme Court of the United States.
This is the forgotten history of the tomato case.
John Nix was one of New York City’s hardest workers, and one of its shrewdest. He made money selling fruit in a small stand on the street, but gradually built his business quite literally from the ground up. He purchased his produce from farmers across New York state but soon realized that the region’s cold winters meant that his business would have to close for months at a time.
In 1839, he devised a solution. With his four sons, he founded the John Nix & Co. Fruit Commission and began importing his fruit from the southern United States and even the Caribbean. While his competitors had to wait out New York’s cold winters until their local farmers could grow again, the Nixes were selling oranges from Florida, apples from Virginia, and strawberries and bananas all the way from Bermuda.
He expanded further into vegetable sales, and contracted with farmers wherever he could find them to provide his customers with produce on demand, no matter the time of year.
He revolutionized the grocery business, and in so doing his own business grew from a small stand into a booming empire. Competitors in New York and produce sellers across the country began to follow his lead, and as a result of his contributions to importing and product transport, Americans could get fresh fruit and vegetables any time they wanted.
But, as it always seems to, government regulation and taxation stood in the way. In 1883, Congress passed the Tariff of 1883, which placed heavy tariffs on certain imported products. After President Chester A. Arthur signed it into law, critics called it the “Mongrel Tariff Act” because of how oppressive it was on the burgeoning American import trade and how arbitrary its application seemed to be.
For instance, the Act placed high tariff rates on vegetables, but not fruit. This had a huge impact on John Nix, and suddenly his empire was in jeopardy. If he couldn’t import fruits and vegetables from outside of the country without paying massive tariffs, he would lose his competitive advantage and potentially his entire business.
Ever the shrewd businessman, though, Nix saw a loophole. New York’s Collector of Customs, Edward Hedden, was enforcing the tariff against Nix’s tomatoes, which Nix knew were actually a fruit. They bore seeds, so botanically, they were easily defined. He filed a lawsuit against Hedden for reimbursement of the tomato tariffs that he claimed Hedden had wrongly collected.
The case went to trial, and Nix’s lawyers submitted as evidence the literal dictionary definition of a tomato from three different dictionaries and followed that up by reading the definitions of other vegetables. Tomatoes were unquestionably a fruit, scientifically speaking. Hedden's attorney responded by reading the dictionary definition of several other vegetables from a different dictionary. Tomatoes were unquestionably a vegetable, practically speaking.
So is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? The question went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and in Nix v. Hedden, it unanimously and somewhat surprisingly ruled that despite what science says, a tomato is a vegetable in the eyes of the law.
The decision rested on the concept of an "ordinary meaning" meaning of a word. Only when a word had a special meaning when it's used in commerce or trade could the court use that special meaning. Since most people thought of a tomato as a vegetable, it's a vegetable regardless of whether it's actually a fruit.
"The passages cited from the dictionaries define the word 'fruit' as the seed of plants, or that part of plants which contains the seed, and especially the juicy, pulpy products of certain plants, covering and containing the seed," Justice Horace Gray wrote in the Court's opinion. "These definitions have no tendency to show that tomatoes are 'fruit,' as distinguished from 'vegetables,' in common speech, or within the meaning of the Tariff Act."
A tomato was, and is, in the eyes of the law, a vegetable. Nix was dismayed but ended up begrudgingly paying the tariff on his vegetable imports. As strange as it is that a fruit is considered a vegetable, Nix v. Hedden has had an impact on Court rulings regarding the common meanings of words.
And, in 2005, with a wink and a nod to the Court's decision, New Jersey designated the tomato as its official state vegetable.