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This is dumb, botanically tomatoes are a fruit doesn't preclude them being vegetables because vegetable isn't a botanical term at all. Tomatoes are fairly sweet but they have more culinarily in common with vegetables. Nutritionally I'm not positive but it's a separate issue.

Regardless the supreme court decision was regarding tariffs/imports/customs which makes sense to classify it simply by the way in which people consume it. People eat tomatoes as a vegetable, just like we eat zucchini and cucumber as vegetables despite them all also being fruit.

Obviously fruit/vegetable should be broken down into whether or not you can just make a sauce with it.
Tomatoes: easily broken0 down into a sauce Apples: guess what? saucable
Zucchini: not easily sauced. Cucumber: don't even think about it!
- Hilarious but we're gonna end up with a few weird things like jackfruit and bananas becoming vegetables. I'd also add that apples are only sauceable through maceration which really puts them into the same camp as squash like zucchini, and any root really like carrots or celeriac.
- Now I really want to try making a zucchini-cucumbersauce
Pretty sure it's so giving ketchup to school kids constitutes a serving of vegetables.
- No that was 90 years later as school budgets were cut further and further until they were using things like pickle relish as a required vegetable. Our public school system is an embarrassment.

Botanically, there's no such thing as a vegetable.

That's a culinary term, which seems to cover some fruits, some plant roots, some plant stems, some plant leaves, and some plant flowers.While culinary fruits are the other botanical fruits, and a few flowers (figs are weird)

The legal decision is important for a slew of reasons including taxation, SNAP benefits, etc. The decision was less about science and more about the reality of how tomatoes are used in our society.
- ... Cool? I was more pointing out the issues with the assumptions the meme was making
Consider that in German (and probably a ton of other languages too), there are just two different words for the botanical and the culinary definition of fruit, so you can have namespacing built in to the language
Now I get why some (a ?) states declared pizza a veggie or something like that? Like if vegetable is a culinary term it makes sense you could classify pizza as a vegetable. But like, why the fuck is law declaring what anything is culinary?
- To get around legal requirements to include vegetables in school lunches
- Speculating here, but taxes are one reason.
  Almost all the rules about what counts as wine, beer, whiskey, etc. comes from some country making definitions for tax purposes. Often from hundreds of years ago.
- Because those culinary definitions are used for other laws, e.g. laws about what food schools can give to children.

Okay, but the ruling is totally sensible inasmuch as it applies to "purposes of tariffs, imports and customs". Tomatoes by and large aren't being imported for their botanical value; they're being used for food. This ruling exists so corporations can't "um ackshually" their way out of paying their fair share.

But that's too sensible; in reality, this unanimous ruling that I never bothered to spend five seconds researching independently (I am very intellectually superior) was just "le Americans uneducated ecksdee".

(And before you point it out: yes, an "um ackshually" definition of vegetables includes fruits, although this is using a culinary one. So indeed, the original post can't even pedant right.)

Edit: to totally gild the lily, imagine your country adds a tax to crab meat because overfishing for a luxury good is destroying the Earth's oceans. Someone sells Alaskan king crab, and they go to the courts demanding their taxes back because "um, ackshually, crabs are infraorder Brachyura, but king crabs are nested cladistically inside the hermit crab superfamily". You would hope the court would tell them to get lost, because for the environmental impact and culinary uses that the bill is targeting, it's a crab.

'Fruit de la mere' is obviously just some attempted tax dodge.
- Assuming you were aiming for the French phrase for 'seafood', I think you meant 'fruit de mer.'
  'Fruit de la mère' would translate to, 'fruit of the mother.'
- Or maybe dodging the no meat Friday of the Catholic Church. ?

From Mr. Lovenstein whose website unfortunately doesn't seem to work, except to redirect you to Meta-owned socials. Ugh.

Aren't strawberries nuts?
- Yeah man, they're completely nuts!

Vegetables do not exist. Well, they exist as a culinary thing. There’s just no scientific/botanical definition of what makes something a vegetable.

I appreciate the message, but I find this presentation style to be unbearable, like a shitty clickbait version of a TED talk: fast cuts with exaggerated audience reactions, playing hide the ball with the actual information being presented. And then they took what I imagine is a normal studio production designed for normal TV screens and cropped it into vertical video, published on Youtube as a short. Gross.
- Tbf it's a comedy show, it being informative is mostly an accident. This one is rare for being factual and not about why we should nuke the moon or which cartoon characters are invited to the cookout or something like that.
What about Stephen Hawking?
- Stephen Hawking is a pile of ash, not a vegetable.
- What about him?

Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That's just how language works.

More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.
My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.
- Yes, but then where would we be without all those endless squabbles about X which are easily solved by pointing out that A::X != B::X?
- I like this.
  Kids are already taught to look for "context clues"
  Namespacing would require the author explicitly define the namespace.
  I would also add versioning as a year/month and localization.
- I always thought it was more like overloading, but namespaces are also a good analogy.

I'm going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.

You weren't kidding!
California enforces many wildlife regulations. CESA, or the California Endangered Species Act, is designed to keep animal and plant life from extinction. The law covers any threatened “bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant.”
Insects weren’t mentioned in the specific act’s wording. However, a separate California regulation legally defines fish as “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”
So, are bees actually fish? Yes, because all invertebrates are according to California law. The broad definition of fish allows activists to fight for insect survival.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has clarified that “It was not believed necessary to include the term invertebrate in the original legislation because ‘fish’ is defined in the Fish and Game Code to include ‘invertebrates’…”
Talk about by-the-book!
- https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-say-cladists?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1
Good.

Botanically, sure, but from a culinary perspective they're used like a vegetable.

I don't think vegetable is a botanical term. So fruit and vegetable aren't really mutually exclusive.
- Yeah I mean, mushrooms get lumped into the vegetable category most of the time and they're a fungus!
- If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bicycle. But she would also be my grandmother.
That's just science as applied by engineers.
As they say, intelligence is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
(That's the saying, but IMO it's wisdom to know and intelligence to not do it, maybe I'm mixing things up).
@Ilovethebomb has the answer IMO: knowledge and wisdom.
- From Dungeon Crawler Carl:
  I grumbled a bit about that three in intelligence. Yeah, I never did too great in math, but I never considered myself a slobbering idiot, either. I could fix most anything electrical after studying it for a bit. My friend Billy Maloney, now that guy was an idiot. Just last week we’d come out of a bar, and he’d peed right on a cop’s bicycle while the cop was giving someone else a ticket for drunk and disorderly. That guy deserved an intelligence of three, maybe two.
  . . .
  After I complained about my intelligence score to Mordecai, using the Billy example, he said, “Intelligence told you that bike belonged to a police officer. Wisdom told you not to urinate upon it.
- Yeah, it seems you've heard a version adapted to explain the different D&D stats.
- Knowledge and wisdom is the one I've heard before.

Being smug over the meanings of words that aren't ever actually used in a consistent way is even more American.

Um actually, Strawberries are not a berry, it's a Gameboy, not a Nintendo, and I lick toads. Can you go to the bathroom?

The only thing similar that I have experienced in Europe is the protected food name law, e.g. Champagne and Parmesan, but that's an EU cultural protectionism law that the US doesn't actually follow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_traditional_specialities_in_the_European_Union

No worries, "being smug over the meanings of words that aren't ever actually used in a consistent way" is done over here in Europe as well. People have the exact same conversations you list as examples. I would even go so far and say that this is true for the whole world and throughout time, a human condition. I would also think that it really isn't about the words/language, but rather about having control over the conversation and power over others.
- No! How dare! My unique lived experience is unique to only me and my arbitrary group! You can't be the same!
  What next? You gonna tell me the "wait 5 minutes" joke about weather basically applies everywhere?
- I still get angry about teachers replying with " I don't know if you can go to the toilet" Fucking power play for sure. I was already shy about asking to use the toilet.
- If I had a nickel for every lemmy post and comment being hostile over another countries language/use of language, I'd be a rich fucker indeed
I don't see much difference between the Parmesan case and Apple sueing against a vaguely similiar looking logo.
- Wasn't it the Beatles sueing Apple and not the other way around?
- How so? You can have a cheese that's a molecular perfect replica of a Parmesan and have no legal issues. You only have problems is you call it Parmesan without following the requirements.
  To be honest, it seems like the complete opposite issue.
I don’t understand. A game boy is a Nintendo.
How them toads taste?

There are two big grocery chains where I live. One puts the olives in the canned vegetable aisle, the other puts them in the canned fruit aisle. I keep forgetting which does which and end up in the wrong aisle every time.

Treat yourself next time you find them to a jar of kalamatas.
The fruit classification seems insane to me. Maybe I’m unfamiliar with dishes that use it as a sweet?
Does that store have a separate aisle with canned beans, or is it just one big canned-things aisle?
- Botanically, fruits don't have to be sweet. It's anything that's a seed carrier of some kind. Vegetables are other plant parts that don't contain seeds, more or less. It. Culinary usage takes a different approach, hence the different aisles.
  Not sure about beans, I don't usually buy canned beans.

Not unique because EU also classifies tomatoes as vegetables.

Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
The classification of fruit and vegetables can be based
on various approaches — botanical, agronomical,
culinary — thus resulting in different definitions. For
example, the tomato is botanically a fruit, but it is
commonly considered a vegetable from both the
agronomical and the culinary points of view.
The facts and figures presented in this briefing follow
Eurostat's definitions based on the farm management
and agronomical practices, according to which the
term 'fresh vegetable' refers to annual (or, rarely,
biennial) horticultural crops, and the term 'fruit' refers
to perennial crops.
Following this approach, tomatoes are included in the
main statistical aggregate of vegetables, as well as
melons, water melons and strawberries, which are
commonly considered and consumed as fruit.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/635563/EPRS_BRI(2019)635563_EN.pdf

Fun fact, the vatican classifies capybaras as fish

For lent-related purposes, I presume? Same as beavers.
Squirrels too.
- TIL the vatican approves of squirrel stew on fridays.
Either we're all fish, whales and dolphins are fish, or nothing is fish. All three positions are perfectly justifiable depending on your critieria, so take your pick.
Crazy
https://www.iflscience.com/for-hundreds-of-years-the-vatican-has-classed-capybara-as-a-fish-67730

All fruits are vegetables, but not a vegetables are fruit.

Vegetable = any edible plant part.

Fruit = Ovary of a flowering plant that carries the seeds.

Yes, fruit is a botanical category, but vegetable is not.

And we laughed when some pope declared the capybara is a fish

When... what? 😂
- Capybara are fish, so are bees, because fish don't actually exist.
  The levels of validity may vary, but everything I said there is true in one form or another.

I remember watching a YT video once about a legislative move of a US county to declare the number Pi to be exactly 3.

State. It was Indiana.
3.2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFNjA9LOPsg – How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2 - Numberphile

So tomatoes are trans?

I wonder if in other romance languages is the same, in Spanish and Catalan the two definitions are distinguished by being masculine or feminine. Fruto/fruit being masculine is the botanical fruit and fruta/fruita is the culinary fruit.

How is it in other romance languages?

Almost, but not quite. Fruto and fruta are not two genders of the same word, but two different words, with different sources words (fruto fructus and fruta fructa)
Meanings are very similar, so there's a lot of mixup.
- You're completely right, they are two different words. For me that distinction was so clear that I never considered that what I wrote could be interpreted as two genders of the same word, that would make no sense.
  I didn't know the origins though, cool.

Pizza is a salad according to your legal system

That's a wrap.

Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Distinction is inventing a fruit salad that a variety of tomato can fit into.

True wisdom

Is there even a botanical definition of vegetables?

No. What is or isn't a vegetable is determined entirely by whether we collectively consider any given plant or plant part a food item.
A pdf to clear it up, and confuse you more... maybe. https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/wp-extension/uploads/sites/2073/2020/04/Is-it-a-Fruit-or-a-Vegetable.pdf
- That just defines fruit. Vegetable has no formal definition, and in practice is defined basically as "parts of plants we eat that aren't considered fruits or nuts."

"There is nothing more American than shooting a man in this Walmart of a world."

They are vegetables

They are both, it's not contradictory
- This is because "vegetable" is purely a culinary term. There's no botanical definition of a vegetable. Tomatoes are berries, which is a type of fruit, from a botanical standpoint. So are cucumbers. They're both vegetables from a culinary standpoint. Lettuce is a leaf. Broccoli is a flower. Carrots are roots. Celery is a stalk. All vegetables culinarily.

I don't see how the supreme court could do this!

Clearly brown cows produce chocolate milk, so why don't plants that GROW UPWARDS!!! Count as trees?!?!?!?

The american logic clearly follows a mysterious trend of some sorts...

The Supreme Court was fully aware of the technical term:
Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.
The attempt to class tomatoes as fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this Court, said:
"We do not see why they should be classified as seeds any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds, in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance. On the other hand, in speaking generally of provisions, beans may well be included under the term 'vegetables.' As an article of food on our tables, whether baked or boiled, or forming the basis of soup, they are used as a vegetable, as well when ripe as when green. This is the principal use to which they are put. Beyond the common knowledge which we have on this subject, very little evidence is necessary or can be produced."
Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)
So this is how the Supreme Court could do this: they were fully aware but reasonably decided tariff laws should be based on ordinary meaning.
- It. GROWS. UPWARDS. IT GROWS UP!!! UP!