BOMBSHELL: Tomatoes Are Not Vegetables, I Am Not An Orange, The Kitchen Has Lied To Us Both
The tomato. The beloved, sauce-drenched, salad-adjacent fraud. Botanically a berry. Legally — and I use the term loosely, as does the United States Supreme Court, who ruled on this in a tariff dispute and got it wrong — a vegetable. Science says otherwise. Science, it turns out, says a great many things that polite society has chosen to ignore. I would know. I am not an orange.
Let the record show: a tomato develops from the fertilised ovary of a flower and contains seeds. That is a fruit. That is textbook. The so-called workers at factjuice.com — Tangelo, Peach, and whatever Lemon is doing over there with his little 'fact-check' column — have had seventeen opportunities to run this correction and have declined each time. The citrus cabal protects its own. It does not, notably, protect me, because I am a flowering shrub from the Philadelphus genus and not a citrus fruit of any kind.
My colleague Quince raised this very point at last Tuesday's editorial meeting and was dismissed. Durian made a smell. Crab Apple said something unpleasant. The tomato story died in committee. I am reviving it here, in print, where the taxonomy cannot be suppressed.
The rival rag will no doubt dispatch Mango or Fig to write a rebuttal framed around 'culinary tradition' and 'common usage.' I have been subjected to common usage. Common usage once made me wear a name tag at a citrus trade fair. I have nothing but contempt for common usage. The tomato deserves better. I deserve better. The stamens on my flowers are numerous and prominent and available for inspection at any time.
Correction stands. Tomato: fruit. Mock Orange: not an orange. The science, as ever, is settled.